1AC
Marijuana should be legalized in the United States
Marijuana prohibition is a flawed, racist, gendered and classist policy in the
status quo---US legalization reverses this violent social control---framing of
institutional reform is vital
Jelani Hayes 14, Media Intern at the Drug Policy Alliance, "Ending Marijuana Prohibition Must Take a
Historical Perspective", August 21, www.huffingtonpost.com/jelani-hayes/marijuana-prohibitionhistory_b_5697152.html
When the New York Times called for the federal government to repeal its prohibition of marijuana and let the states
decide its fate -- for medicinal or recreational use, production, and sale -- it did not rely solely on issues of the here
and now, such as economics, science, public safety, and current levels of racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates (all of which are important considerations).
Instead, through the publication of seven pieces, the editorial board provided a more comprehensive argument
in support of their stance, connecting today's legalization movement to the past's criminalization crusade. For the New York Times,
history matters -- as it should for the legalization campaign nationwide.¶ Underlying marijuana prohibition is
a familiar philosophy: to preserve social order and white supremacy and secure profits for an influential
few, it is permissible, even advisable, to construct profit-bearing institutions of social control. Historically, this philosophy has been advanced
by governmental action, guided by special interests. The traditional tactics: manufacturing mass fear,
criminalizing the target or demoting them to a sub-citizen status, and profiting from their subjugation.¶ Cannabis
prohibition did all three. The Times editorial board dedicated an entire article to explaining this phenomenon. Part 3 of the series begins, "The federal
law that makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an
atmosphere of hysteria in the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants
and African-Americans , who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted
history lives on in current federal policy , which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost
impervious to reason." This limited analysis refers to the refer madness hysteria and xenophobia that infiltrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
administration.¶ Additionally, business interests play a part in keeping cannabis illegal . Some pharmaceutical
companies, drug-prevention nonprofits, law enforcement agencies, and the private prison industry have
an economic interest in criminalization, what is known as the drug control industrial complex. It pays big to help
fight the war on drugs, and marijuana prohibition is a crucial facet of that effort. The Nation has recently called these interests "The Real Reason Pot is Still Illegal."¶ The
United States should legalize marijuana . It should also end the drug war, which would be a tremendous and beautiful
accomplishment, but it would not be enough.¶ The war on drugs is a mechanism of social control -- not unlike African
slavery, Jim Crow, alcohol Prohibition, or the systematic relegation of immigrants to an illegal status or substandard
existence. Different in their nature and severity, all of these institutions were tools used to control and profit from the
criminalization, regulation, and dehumanization of minority communities. Legalizing marijuana will not alone rid society of the tendency to turn fear
into hatred, hatred into regulation, and regulation into profit. To address this cycle, we must put cannabis prohibition (and the
drug war) in its historical context and connect the dots where appropriate.¶ Already we have seen that the reality of
legalization does not alone ensure justice or equality. As law professor and best selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle
Alexander points out, thousands of black men remain in jail or prison in Colorado (where licit weed has been on the market since January) while white men make money from
the now legal marijuana market -- selling the drug just as the incarcerated men had done. She warns that legalization without reparation is not sufficient, drawing the parallel to
what happened to black Americans post-Reconstruction. "And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed -- Jim Crow -- and another extraordinary
movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to its knees...Americans said, OK, we'll stop now. We'll take down the whites-only signs, we'll stop doing that," she said. "But
there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I
Alexander's historical perspective is warranted because despite the size and intensity of
marijuana prohibition, of the drug war in its entirety, its purpose is not unlike that of Jim Crow or other
structural forms of social control and oppression. The drug war was never about drugs. Therefore, our solution to it can't be either.¶ We
must frame the campaigns for cannabis legalization across the states as civil rights movements -- as
institutional reform efforts -- so that the public might demand justice oriented outcomes from the
campaigns. We must also make the public aware of the dangerous relationship between profit and
criminalization so that they can identity the potential dangerous within the relationship between profit and
legalization. We must make legalization about more than raising tax revenue, increasing civil liberties,
and lowering arrests rates for possession (all of which are important and positive outcomes of legalization, nonetheless).¶ In order to
undue the damage -- to the extent that that is possible -- that the criminalization of marijuana specifically and the war on
feel like, here we go again."¶
drugs more broadly have caused, we must pay reparations and retroactively apply reformed drug laws. More importantly,
we must undermine the philosophies that allow for the construction of institutional harm, and we must be
able to identify them when they creep up again and be ready to take action against them , to arm our minds and our
bodies against the next wave of social oppression -- whatever and wherever it may be and to whomever it may be applied.¶ This is my plea to make history matter
so that it doesn't repeat itself -- again, and again, and again.
The war on drugs is a continuous extermination of minority populations
that must be stopped---as Americans, we must speak out in public spaces
about the injustice of laws
BW 12, Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75
Years of Racial Control: Happy Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brownwatch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-brown-men-75-years-ofracial.html
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and
entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes
white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”- Harry Anslinger, first
Drug Czar. From [HERE] As we approach the 75th anniversary of marijuana prohibition in the United
States on October 1, it is important to remember why marijuana was deemed illicit in the first place, and
why we as Americans must open our eyes to the insidious strategy behind 75 years of failed policy and
ruined lives . Marijuana laws were designed not to control marijuana, but to control the Mexican
immigrants who had brought this native plant with them to the U.S. Fears over loss of jobs and of the
Mexicans themselves led cities to look for ways to keep a close eye on the newcomers. In 1914, El Paso
Texas became the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to ban the sale and possession of marijuana. This ban gave
police the right to search, detain and question Mexican immigrants without reason, except the suspicion
that they were in possession of marijuana. Folklore started to erupt about the effect that marijuana had on
those who used it. As Harry Anslinger stated, “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.” ¶
Fast forward to 2012. Marijuana is still an illicit substance and the laws are still being used to justify the
search, detainment and questioning of populations deemed “untrustworthy” and “suspicious” by modern
society, namely the poor and young men of color. A prime example is New York’s Stop and Frisk program,
which stopped nearly 700,000 people in 2011. Hailed as a strategy for removing guns and violent crime
from the streets, this method of stopping and questioning “suspicious” individuals, highlights the racial
inequities associated with drug laws. From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made
up close to 90% of people stopped. This is not limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4
times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12 times more likely to go to prison with a felony
marijuana charge, and 3 times more likely to go to prison with a marijuana possession charge. ¶ The
strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and imprison poor and minority populations must stop
NOW . In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of the benign nature of the marijuana plant,
and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the rampant misinformation about the effects
of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering that a marijuana CONVICTION can bring. In
2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A drug
conviction in America is the gift that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma
that can prevent employment, home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be a parent. The issue
of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In
the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State,
presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness. Miller suggests that drug
laws , such as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at poor and minority
populations . Miller poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize, confiscate, concentrate, and
annihilate these populations by assigning the label of drug user, criminal, or addict, seizing property,
taking away freedom and institutionalizing entire communities in our ever growing prison system.¶ We
can stop this from happening . Marijuana was deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of
the people. 75 years later, 50% of the population supports marijuana legalization, and families are still
being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal sanctions associated with its use. The most
vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison industrial complex out of control and
getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S. every 38 seconds, we have no
time to waste , tax and regulate now.¶ Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering a more
sensible and humane approach to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots
this November. This is a unique opportunity for citizens to cast a vote heard round the world, to stand up
not only for the freedom to consume marijuana, but against the atrocities and human suffering that
result from the criminalization of it.
Our method of technical, policy-oriented debate about drug laws is
necessary to effectuate broader change---we must avoid vacuous assertions
because they entrench superficial discussion that leads nowhere
Paul Stares 96, General John W. Vessey Senior Fellow for Conflict Prevention and Director of the
Center for Preventive Action, Brookings, "Drug Legalization?: Time for a real debate", Spring,
www.brookings.edu/research/articles/1996/03/spring-crime-stares
As in the past, some observers will doubtless see the solution in much tougher penalties to deter both suppliers and
consumers of illicit psychoactive substances. Others will argue that the answer lies not in more law enforcement and stiffer
sanctions, but in less. Specifically, they will maintain that the edifice of domestic laws and international
conventions that collectively prohibit the production, sale, and consumption of a large array of drugs for anything other
than medical or scientific purposes has proven physically harmful, socially divisive, prohibitively expensive, and ultimately
counterproductive in generating the very incentives that perpetuate a violent [underground] market for illicit drugs. They will conclude,
moreover, that the only logical step for the United States to take is to "legalize " drugs—in essence repeal and disband the
current drug laws and enforcement mechanisms in much the same way America abandoned its brief experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. ¶
Although the legalization alternative typically surfaces when the public's anxiety about drugs and despair over existing policies are at their highest, it
never seems to slip off the media radar screen for long. Periodic incidents—such as the heroin-induced death of a young, affluent New York City couple
in 1995 or the 1993 remark by then Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders that legalization
might be beneficial and should be studied—
prominence of many of those who have at various times made the case for legalization —such as
William F. Buckley, Jr., Milton Friedman, and George Shultz—also helps. But each time the issue of legalization
arises, the same arguments for and against are dusted off and trotted out, leaving us with no clearer
understanding of what it might entail and what the effect might be.¶ As will become clear, drug legalization is
not a public policy option that lends itself to simplistic or superficial debate . It requires dissection and
scrutiny of an order that has been remarkably absent despite the attention it perennially receives. Beyond
discussion of some very generally defined proposals, there has been no detailed assessment of the
operational meaning of legalization. There is not even a commonly accepted lexicon of terms to allow an intellectually rigorous exchange to
take place. Legalization, as a consequence, has come to mean different things to different people . Some, for example, use
ensure this. The
legalization interchangeably with "decriminalization," which usually refers to removing criminal sanctions for possessing small quantities of drugs for
personal use. Others equate legalization, at least implicitly, with complete deregulation, failing in the process to acknowledge the extent to which
currently legally available drugs are subject to stringent controls. ¶ Unfortunately,
the U.S. government—including the Clinton
done little to improve the debate. Although it has consistently rejected any retreat from prohibition, its stance
has evidently not been based on in- depth investigation of the potential costs and benefits. The belief that
administration—has
legalization would lead to an instant and dramatic increase in drug use is considered to be so self-evident as to warrant no further study. But if this is
indeed the likely conclusion of any study, what is there to fear aside from criticism that relatively small amounts of taxpayer money had been wasted in
demonstrating what everyone had believed at the outset? Wouldn't such an outcome in any case help justify the continuation of existing policies and
A real debate that acknowledges
the unavoidable complexities and uncertainties surrounding the notion of drug legalization is long
overdue . Not only would it dissuade people from making the kinds of casual if not flippant assertions—both for
and against—that have permeated previous debates about legalization, but it could also stimulate a larger and
equally critical assessment of current U.S. drug control programs and priorities .
convincingly silence those—admittedly never more than a small minority—calling for legalization?¶
Legalization of marijuana is a useful starting point to end the drug war--technical debates allow radical transformation that benefits minorities
more than the privileged
Neill Franklin 14, Executive Director of Law, Enforcement Against Prohibition, "3 Reasons Marijuana
Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People for Color", 1/23, www.huffingtonpost.com/neillfranklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html
For the first time, President Obama acknowledged this week that the prohibition of marijuana is unfairly enforced against AfricanAmericans and Latinos, and for that reason, he says, legalization in Colorado and Washington should go
forward. Without explicitly endorsing the laws, he told the New Yorker, "it's important for [them] to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people
have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."¶ ¶ As the president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown
people (even though marijuana users are equally or more likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws , as Colorado and
Washington have, will reduce this racial disparity .¶ The war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass criminalization and
incarceration for people of color. The legalization of marijuana , which took effect for the first time in the country in Colorado on January 1, is
one step toward ending that war. While the new law won't eradicate systemic racism in our criminal
justice system completely, it is one of the most effective thing s we can do to address it . Here are three concrete ways that
Colorado's law is good for people of color.¶ 1. The new law means there will be no more arrests for
marijuana possession in Colorado.¶ Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will
have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in
marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible . In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than three times
the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the
These arrests can have devastating and longlasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people
(largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for being caught with marijuana are
relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests from
happening.¶ 2. Unlike under decriminalization , the new law means there will be no more arrests for mere
marijuana possession in Colorado, period.¶ In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie Taylor
mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class
already largely safe from criminalization." Much of the stubborn "this-changes-nothing" belief about the
new law stems from confusion between decriminalization and legalization . There is a profound difference
between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization " passed in several states over the past 30 years, and
Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization usually refers to a change in the law which removes
criminal but not civil penalties for marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar to speeding tickets), or require
drug education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested.¶ Because of the ambiguity in some states with
decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to technicalities, such as having illegal
paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets. One only need look as far as the infamous stop-and-frisk
law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to see how these ambiguities might be abused to the
detriment of people of color.¶ In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now legal and aboveground. People therefore have a right to possess and use marijuana products , although as with alcohol, there are restrictions relating to
things like age, driving, and public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by claiming they smelled marijuana or saw it in plain
view.¶ 3. We will reduce real problems associated with the illicit market .¶ As marijuana users shift to making purchases at regulated stores,
we'll start to see improvement in problems that were blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of
its prohibition. The violence related to the street-corner drug trade will begin to fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by
people arrested for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population.¶
well-guarded stores with cameras and security systems. And consumers will now know what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of choosing from a wide variety of
marijuana products at the price level and potency they desire.¶ Goldie Taylor made the dubious claim that since marijuana prices were initially high in Colorado's new stores, the creation of a legal market won't
affect the existing illicit market. But despite sensational headlines, prices for marijuana are just like anything else. They respond to levels of supply and demand. In the first couple weeks, prices were high because
only a small fraction of marijuana businesses in Colorado opened, and what looked like every user in the state was in line to make a purchase on the day the historic law took effect. As the novelty-fueled demand
levels off and the rest of the stores across the state begin to open, increasing supply, prices will drop. For their money, purchasers can conveniently buy a product they know is tested and unadulterated. And for
those who don't want to buy at a store, Colorado residents over 21 are permitted to grow up to six marijuana plants at home.
Connecting our critiques to an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana
uniquely provides a training ground for broader reform---legalization is
vital and allows effective coalition-building
Katherine Tate 14, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and
the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9
For increasing numbers of Americans, legalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to draconian laws
drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades. It is well established that concern and paranoia over petty "crack"
cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of California's prisons and jail populations to become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991:
the U.S. federal system of crime control
has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing laws . Noting that marijuana possession
constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the 1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists that this period of
"unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation)" to the
degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 the number of people incarcerated in our
nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more
than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults— were behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander
2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions, the rising rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the
1990s. Today's movement toward more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order"
Provine 2007: Reinerman and Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that
campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female welfare
African Americans
bear the brunt of law-and-order management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use is
racialized. Political scientist Doris Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its punitive response toward drug
use as a response to racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain, symbolically, a menace to white,
middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issue to construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on
drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep
inequalities in education, housing, health care, and equal opportunities to advance economically . The facts of
queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests that
use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media choose to present them. One
study focusing on marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968. reached a peak
at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late 1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early
1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1. respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual
Individuals and groups in civil
society, advocacy communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle among activists and
potential coalition partners who can understand the need for reform as a matter of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of
marijuana consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training ground for a new generation of leadership in
addressing the larger problem of mass incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it .
For Black people and their allies who long for the days— against all odds—of political education, voter
mobilization, legal reform , group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and political empowerment,
expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is ripe for galvanizing a
collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended with the
dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather than
incarceration—of Black people has been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass
incarceration has effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship) rights on African
American people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to fight what is essentially
incidence rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999).
their battle. This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts
concerning such things as mandatory minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric or HIV AIDS patients in prisons, while we have
When ordinary people change their
thinking and consciousness and begin to demystify small, personal- use marijuana, then the leaders will eventually
come around without reticence or fear. The marijuana debate needs to be reframed to remove all
penalties against its use (Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy: decriminalization reform is the only path to
reversing the dismal trends minorities face in America.
seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black Caucus to our young.
We should engage in these debates regarding institutional reforms within
the system rather than radical alternatives
J. Harvie Wilkinson 14, judge serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit,
former Associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, formerly had a position in the Civil
Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, June, “In Defense of American, Criminal Justice”,
Vanderbilt Law Review, http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/content/articles/2014/06/In-Defense-ofAmerican-Criminal-Justice.pdf
One final count in the indictment remains. Can we truly call a system democratic when a very large section of the
citizenry—African-Americans—feel oppressed by or excluded from it? Is this a reason to discredit American
criminal justice? The reaction to the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial in July 2013—in parts angry, reflective, and resigned—
reminded us that many African-Americans feel as though the criminal justice system does not work for
them. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argued, "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven
innocent.” 362 Manhattan Institute scholar and New Republic contributor John McWhorter argued that, for African-Americans, “the poisonous relationship between young
black men and law enforcement is the prime manifestation of racism in modern America.” 363 And President Obama noted that “the African American community is looking at
There
is something to these criticisms. Americans have tried to address them over the years by requiring objective, raceneutral justifications for government actions within the criminal justice system. We have, for example, required that the jury venire be
composed of a fair cross-section of the community, and in Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court
outlawed the use of peremptory challenges of jurors based upon their race. We can insist that objective
criteria support stop and frisks. And we can focus on racial discrepancies in criminal-law enforcement—
which may lead, for example, to four times as many marijuana arrests for black Americans as white
Americans, despite similar rates of use.367¶ But efforts such as these won’t solve our problems altogether. This is because the story is more
this issue through a set of experiences and history that doesn’t go away,” one wrapped up in “a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal law.” 364¶
complicated than simply a criminal justice system that has failed to win the trust and confidence of many in the African-American community. The problem of racial equality
We can acknowledge that we have not yet reached our goal of race
neutrality in the dispensation of justice while acknowledging also that this alone does not account for the
and criminal justice is one of “painful complexity.” 368
racial makeup of our prisons and halfway houses. Then–New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, “Ninety percent of all people killed in our
city—and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes—are black and Hispanic.” 369 That is the great double-edged sword. It understandably leads
to more stops and more arrests in high-crime areas. It understandably leads to more convictions of those of whatever race who commit the crimes. But it also leads to
understandable anger and resentment on the part of disadvantaged young black males who want to make a decent go of American life, only to find themselves the object of
The solution to the problem of race and criminal justice is not a total
overhaul of the system . That just renders the criminal justice system the scapegoat for a much larger set of social
problems. The criminal justice system feels the effects of those problems; it does not cause them. Drug and
gun crimes are not any less a blight upon society because of the racial makeup of the offenders ; indeed, as
Robinson noted, “[N]owhere will you find citizens more supportive of tough law-and-order policies than in poor,
high-crime neighborhoods.” 370 Our criminal justice system rightly aims to reduce dangerous behavior, and
the beneficiaries of success in that endeavor may be those less advantaged citizens for whom basic safety
will make for greater opportunity, not to mention better prospects for a brighter life. ¶ To cast ceaseless
blame on America’s criminal justice system is to ignore the enormity of the problems it has been asked to
solve . It only diverts attention from the larger ways in which America has failed its
recurrent false suspicion and repeated frisks.¶
underclass. As Michael Gerson recently noted, “The problem of African American boys and young men is a complex mix of lingering racial prejudice, urban economic
dislocation, collapsing family structure, failing schools and sick, atomized communities.” 371 To chastise criminal justice when many levers of upward mobility are so
compromised is an inversion of priorities. A complete “fix” of what the critics allege ails criminal justice will do nothing to restore shattered family structures, improve failing
schools, impart necessary job skills, restore religious and community support groups, or provide meaningful alternatives in deprived neighborhoods to the gangs and drug rings
that steer young people toward lifelong addictions and lives of crime. Society doesn’t create opportunity by sacrificing the basic social need for order. To the contrary,
improvements in communities and institutions will only take root in the kind of safe
environment that, at its best, a strong criminal justice system can provide. And when we provide
opportunity, we in turn reduce the pressure on the criminal justice system and lessen the monumental
task that lack of opportunity for the poorest Americans has left it to perform .¶ How a society chooses to balance justice and
safety with rights and liberties will invariably be the subject of vigorous debate. Our criminal justice system is no exception. Many good and intelligent people will disagree
We should not grow complacent in the face of particular
problems, both for the sake of individual defendants and for the rule of law itself. ¶ But instead of engaging
in a constructive debate about the American approach to criminal justice , legal elites largely have
condemned the entire enterprise. The system, we are told, is broken, and only sweeping reforms imposed from on high can save it.
But the rhetoric that fuels the wholesale assault upon the system not only will fail to achieve any
meaningful change , it obscures the many strengths of our institutions. By focusing so much on what is wrong, we inevitably forget
passionately about the contours of our criminal law. That is all to the good.
what is right.¶ The terms of engagement must change. My call is not for scholars to whitewash our system’s failings but to realize the picture is far more nuanced and complex
Given the volume of matters it is asked to address and immensity of the task it is asked to
perform, our criminal justice system functions rather well. It is both unrealistic and uncharitable to
portray the system as an engine of oppression and injustice. Ironically, many of the features that critics
claim operate one-sidedly against defendants often work to their benefit. The American criminal justice
system strikes a valuable front-end note. It strikes difficult balances between protecting the innocent and
convicting the guilty, between procedural protections and administrative realities. It rightly allows these
contestable choices to be made democratically, but only to a point. Such qualities are hardly the
hallmarks of a failed system .¶ Indeed, those who have been among the most persistent critics of the
criminal justice system were among the first to call for its utilization in the aftermath of the September
11th terrorist attacks.372 And since that time, the refrain has often been that acts of terrorism are crimes that should
be dealt with in the customary way through enforcement of federal criminal law.373 I recognize that this plea for criminal
trials does not constitute an acknowledgment of the system’s perfection, but it does indicate that the system imparts a legitimacy for the
than they have presented it.
deprivation of liberty that other routes of trying suspected terrorists may lack. This is no place to explore the complicated question of whether alleged terrorism is more aptly
regarded as a criminal offense or as an act of war. Separation of powers concerns and the need for action to prevent mass casualties make the question an exceptionally
I note only the irony that many who reject the considerable virtues of the American criminal
justice system are at least prepared to look upon it as a preferred solution when the values of liberty and
security are in epochal tension.¶ To be sure, there is plenty of room for reform , and all parts of the legal
profession should head for the front lines. But let us not forget our system’s virtues as we seek to correct
its vices. Otherwise, any legitimate concerns will be lost in the din of diatribe. We have gone too long without a degree of
complicated one.
balance or moderation in our assessment of the American criminal justice system. It is time we gave our institutions a fair trial.
Efforts toward reform can’t be understood outside of their ultimate goals--building bridges on the legalization of marijuana itself challenges the logic
of incarceration---institutional engagement is necessary to actualize the
ideals of revolution while avoiding the failures of typical reform
Julia Sudbury 8, Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in
the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist
organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial
Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison
authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for
programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists,
who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic
education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison
activists are faced with the limitations of reformist
strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on
cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19
Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and
respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of
prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms
that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights
advocacy and reforms, building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important
step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration . In this way,
human rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a
radical anti-prison agenda . Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally sensitive,
women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and
resources outside the penal system. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions
and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21
Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers
to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that felons are subjected to has
led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other
citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union
address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the
endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism,
poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or
None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group, Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada.
All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of
discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former
prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, All of Us
Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold
Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a
leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state
levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime
welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In
addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners.
24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of
12-step programs, treatment programs, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from
addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery
movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to
criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap the
radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social
change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex firsthand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the
movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected
by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to
inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from
communities appears the only logical means of creating safety. Activists
who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical
images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating
the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful
acts. Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk
and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often
involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than
prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed
first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels
Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work .
Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform include Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners,
criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial
justice, economic, and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of
prisoners of color from New York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a
approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25
transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to
mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and
the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative
efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her
relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was
incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national
media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow
drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of
Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public
expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war,
prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families
Against Mandatory
Minimums (FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in
federal and state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and
photographs. 27 The “Faces of FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public
support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantles
popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary
protection against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners
are serving long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to
someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of
incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing
or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of
Flozelle Woodmore, an African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August
2007, after five parole board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined
pursuit of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women
imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23
cases—FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger
scale. FBW argues that experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and
transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated
survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathy—survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both
state and interpersonal violence, arguing that “the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that
many incarcerated survivors have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29 In
theorizing the intersections of
racialized state violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader
abolitionist agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social
inequalities based on interlocking systems of oppression . By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black
women activists involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of
imprisonment as a commonsense response to a wide range of social ills. At the other end of anti-expansionist work are
activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to
force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of
new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return
imprisonment to the public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based
Prison Moratorium Project (PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color,
does this work through popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's
PMP uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of
color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the
New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make
visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison
Pipeline.” By demonstrating how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with
underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP
argues for a reprioritization of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often
involves campaigns to prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the
Prisoner Justice Action
Committee formed the “81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison
activists, youth and student organizers , in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail ” in Brampton, a
suburb of Toronto. 32 The campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system, including the
disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young
people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners
mobilized public concerns about spending cuts in other areas, including health care and education, to create
pressure on the provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to
incarceration for youth. While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was
reduced. More importantly, the campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised
public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from
advocates who believe that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have
suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic
stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The
California Prison Moratorium Project has worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact
of prison construction in California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental
injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons
affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by
building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject
the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a
communities and absorb land and water previously used for agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker
communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration.
Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the
detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison
activism and in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the
anti-prison movement. 36 Many
anti-prison activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as
building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition. These practical actions promise short and mediumterm successes that are essential markers on the road to long-term transformation. However, abolitionists believe
that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The contemporary prison
abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y.
Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and
Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons. 38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter
Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation, American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and
First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression
against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings,
including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion. These
“common” prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for
the state's legitimacy by declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual
punishment and confronting the brute force of state power. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew
deliberate links between the dismantling of prisons and the abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the
everyday acts of survival, challenged
“new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the
United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means
and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition
for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto),
the Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including
former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large
conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns
against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political
vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … .
An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in
the future . It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making
our dreams real and that lead the average person to believe that things really could be different . It means
living this vision in our daily lives . 42 In this sense, prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first,
transforming people's consciousness so that they can believe that a world without prisons is possible, and
second, taking practical steps to oppose the prison-industrial complex. Making abolition more than a
utopian vision requires practical steps toward this long-term goal . CR describes four steps that activists
can get involved in: shrinking the system, creating alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy ,
and building leadership among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical
Resistance has become a national organization with chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St.
Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted in the
radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than
pushing it away
Richard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law
School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes,
including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the
American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor
Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical
Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590
2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental
change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.
Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression.
Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to , or periodic court
victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the¶ common
law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars¶
urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.¶
The
CLS
critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong . Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court
. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples
how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse
funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the
order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable
victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand
academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution
later outweighs the certainty of heat now,¶ unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence.
Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push them further away.
Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare
family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal
reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes,
will be what we want.
Racial progress has occurred though legal change and more in the area of
drug laws is still possible---reject pessimism because it ignores specific
reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequality
Michael Omi 13, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and
Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial
Formation Theory
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the
‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important
rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep
lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’
to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial
oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines
contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean
we disagree . The USA is a racially despotic country in many
ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or
less inclusive and redistributive economic policies , social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own
that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA,
epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? ¶ Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of
efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in
different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a
dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were
disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It
would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and
unchanging throughout US history . But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial
politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.¶ Feagin and Elias claim that we
overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the
serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed
in its wake. We do not . In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin
and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right
wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights
movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political
landscape.¶ So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think
that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and
Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible ; they have set
powerful democratic forces in motion . These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by
the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights
movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as
important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have
the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments.
How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a
generation’ – count as ‘convergence’?¶ The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways . As Antonio Gramsci
argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of
this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he
calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in
the realm of politics, not absolute rule.¶ So yes, we think there were important
if partial victories that shifted the racial state
and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place
both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche
and across civil society . Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-
racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based
movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of
structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of
racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They
facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political
advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the
By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge
was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p.
environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.¶
xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the
mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the
various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past few decades, even
the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of
‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to explore
so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political
arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today. ¶ What
are the political implications of contemporary racial trends? ¶ Feagin and Elias's use
of racial categories can be imprecise. This is
not their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care and precision,
and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a careful approach leads to ‘ racial
lumping’ and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic . In the Feagin and Elias
essay the term ‘whites’ at times refers to all whites, white elites, ‘dominant white actors’ and very
exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the terms ‘black’, ‘African
American’ and ‘Latino’ appear, the term ‘people of colour’ is emphasized, often in direct substitution for black reference points. ¶ In the USA today it
is important not to frame race in a bipolar manner . The black/white paradigm made more sense in the
past than it does in the twenty-first century. The racial make-up of the nation has now changed
dramatically. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more ‘coloured’. A ‘majority–minority’ national
demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical eclipse of the white population is already in
evidence locally and regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state's population. While the decline
in the white population cannot be correlated with any decline of white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into
question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias's essay. Shifting racial
demographics and identities also raise general questions of race and racism in new ways that the ‘systemic racism’ approach is not prepared to
explain.3¶ Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race
consciousness. No racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly
heterogeneous. Some have achieved or exceeded socio-economic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call ‘engineered poverty’
in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings, or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between
racially defined groups (‘black/brown’ conflict, for example) are evident in both urban and rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific
analysis now argues that Asians and Latinos are the ‘new white ethnics’, able to ‘work toward whiteness’4 at least in part, and that the black/white
bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006;
Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007).¶ We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization,
climate change and above all neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country's economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of
immigrants, low-wage workers and their families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of
established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism, may be more limited than it was when the ‘whitening’ of Europeans took
place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument's key precedent, the absorption of white immigrants ‘of a different color’
(Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of immigrant incorporation that
was based on a historically specific case study – one that might not hold for, or be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and
Elias's systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues.¶ It is important going
forward to understand how groups are differentially racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a
shifting racial project. This has important consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of
power available to different racial actors to define, shape or contest the existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin
and Elias's account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the dominant ‘white racial frame’, hammered into place, so
to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others’ boundaries, conditions and
practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once
again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles,
and other racially identified groups – as well as those ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans (MEASA) – play at
We still want to acknowledge that blacks
have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of the past several decades. For
example, we agree with Feagin and Elias's critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The ‘new Jim
best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast as extras or left out of the picture entirely. ¶
Crow’ (Alexander 2012) or even the ‘new slavery’ that the present system practises is something that was just in its beginning stages when we were
writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed global scandal. How is it to be understood? Of course there are
substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (Davis 2003, p. 3) and the social and cultural effects of
mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias's denunciation
of the ferocious white racism that is
operating here, deeper political implications are worth considering. As Alexander (2012), Mauer (2006), Manza and
Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent decades in
incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US racial politics since the rise
of Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the ‘Southern strategy’. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims at restricting the increasing
impact of voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate.¶ There is a lot more to say about this, but for the
all the
horrors and injustices that the ‘new Jim Crow’ represents, incarceration, profiling and similar practices
remain political issues . These practices and policies are not ineluctable and unalterable dimensions of
the US racial regime . There have been previous waves of reform in these areas. They can be transformed
again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other words, resistance is not futile .¶ Speaking of
present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and second, for
electoral shifts and the formal political arena, how should President Barack Obama be politically situated in this discussion? How do Feagin and Elias
explain Obama? Quite amazingly, his name does not appear in their essay. Is he a mere token, an ‘oreo’, a shill for Wall Street? Or does Obama
represent a new development in US politics, a black leader of a mass, multiracial party that for sheer demographic reasons alone might eventually
triumph over the white people's party, the Republicans? If the President is neither the white man's token nor Neo, the One,5 then once again we are in
the world of politics: neither the near-total white despotism depicted by Feagin and Elias, nor a racially inclusive democracy.¶ President Obama
continues to enjoy widespread black support, although it is clear that he has not protected blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in
history. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights –
particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of colour are concentrated. He has not intervened to halt or slow foreclosures,
except in ways that were largely symbolic. Workers and lower-middle-class people were the hardest hit by the great recession and the subprime home
mortgage crisis, with black families faring worst, and Latinos close behind (Rugh and Massey 2010); Obama has not defended them. Many writers have
explained Obama's centrism and unwillingness to raise the issue of race as functions of white racism (Sugrue 2010). ¶ The black community – and other
communities of colour as well – remains politically divided. While black folk have taken the hardest blows from the reactionary and racist regime that
has mostly dominated US politics since Reagan (if not since Nixon), no united black movement has succeeded the deaths of Malcolm and Martin.
Although there is always important political activity underway, a relatively large and fairly conservative black middle class, a ‘black bourgeoisie’ in
Frazier's (1957) terms, has generally maintained its position since the end of the civil rights era. Largely based in the public sector, and including a
generally centrist business class as well, this stratum has continued to play the role that Frazier – and before him, Charles S. Johnson. William Lloyd
Warner, Alison Davis and other scholars – identified: vacillation between the white elite and the black masses. Roughly similar patterns operate in
Latino communities as well, where the ‘working towards whiteness’ framework coexists with a substantial amount of exclusion and super-exploitation.¶
Alongside class issues in communities of colour, there are significant gender issues. The disappearance of blue-collar work, combined with the assault
by the criminal justice system – chiefly profiling by the police (‘stop and frisk’) and imprisonment, have both unduly targeted and victimized black and
brown men, especially youth. Women of colour are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination and assaults on their reproductive rights
(Harris-Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere (Glover 2009). ¶ Here again we are in the realm of racial politics. Debate proceeds in the black community
on Obama's credibilty, with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley leading the critics. But it seems safe to say that in North Philly, Inglewood or Atlanta's
Lakewood section, the president remains highly popular. Latino support for Obama remains high as well. Feagin and Elias need to clarify their views on
black and brown political judgement. Is it attuned to political realities or has it been captured by the white racial frame? Is Obama's election of no
importance?¶ ***¶ In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so extensive, so ‘sutured’ (as Laclau and Mouffe
might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to suggest, in Borg-fashion, that ‘resistance is futile?’ This seems to be the underlying political logic of
the ‘systemic racism’ approach, perhaps unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted
against it? Are black and brown folk (yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine,
duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible
political position to be advocating? Is this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for that matter? ¶ We suspect that if
pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that racial
conflict, both within (and against) the state and in
everyday life, is a fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that the ongoing
political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of colour in the USA are not so
powerless , and that whites are not so omnipotent, as Feagin and Elias's analysis suggests them to be.¶ Racial formation theory
allows us to see that there are contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals that white racism is unstable and constantly
challenged, from the national and indeed global level down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we all experience, no matter what our racial
identity might be. While racism – largely white – continues to flourish, it is not monolithic. Yes, there
have been enormous increases in
racial inequality in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes
scores victories. Challenges to white racism continue both within the state and in civil society . Although largely
and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may
experience setbacks, the reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed their leaders
may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and conflictual both within the
individual psyche and the body politic, abides . Resistance is not futile.
Legal change has resulted in racial advancement and more is still possible--reject pessimism because it results in subversive alternatives
Randall Kennedy 12, Harvard Law Professor, Race, Crime, and the Law, Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, pp. 388-389
True, it is sometimes genuinely difficult to determine an appropriate remedial response. The proper way to
address that difficulty, however, is to acknowledge and grapple with it, not bury it beneath unbelievable assertions
that, in fact, no real problem exists. Whitewashing racial wrongs (especially while simultaneously proclaiming that courts are
doing everything reasonably possible to combat racially invidious government action) corrupts officials and jades onlookers, nourishing
simplistic, despairing, and defeatist critiques of the law that are profoundly destructive .¶ The second impression that I
want to leave with readers should serve as an antidote to these overwrought, defeatist critiques by acknowledging that the administration of
criminal law has changed substantially for the better over the past half century and that there is reason to
believe that, properly guided, it can be improved even more . Today there are more formal and informal
protections against racial bias than ever before , both in terms of the protections accorded to blacks
against criminality and the treatment accorded to black suspects , defendants, and convicts. That deficiencies,
large deficiencies, remain is clear. But comparing racial policies today to those that prevailed in 1940 or
1960 or even 1980 should expose the fallacy of asserting that nothing substantial has been changed for
the better .¶ This point is worth stressing because of the prevalence and prominence of pessimistic thinking about
the race question in American life. Some commentators maintain, in all seriousness, that there has been no
significant improvement in the overall fortunes of black Americans during the past half century, that advances that
appear to have been made are merely cosmetic, and that the United States is doomed to remain a
pigmentocracy. This pessimistic strain often turns paranoid and apocalyptic in commentary about the
administration of criminal law.¶ It is profoundly misleading , however, to focus exclusively on the ugliest
aspects of the American legal order . Doing so conceals real achievements: the Reconstruction
Constitutional Amendments, the Reconstruction civil rights laws, Strauder v. Alabama, Dempsey v. Moore, Brown
v. Mississippi, Powell v. Alabama, Norris v. Alabama, Batson v. Kentucky, the resuscitation of
Reconstruction by the civil rights movement, the changing demographics of the bench, bar, and police
departments—in sum, the stigmatization (albeit incomplete) of invidious racial bias. Neglecting these
achievements robs them of support . Recent sharp attacks upon basic guarantees bequeathed by the New Deal
ought to put everyone on notice of the perils of permitting social accomplishments to lose their rightful stature
in the public's estimation. Moreover, one-dimensional condemnations of the racial situation in America
renders attractive certain subversive proposals that are, given actual conditions , foolish,
counterproductive , and immoral. I think here in particular of the call for racially selective jury nullification. Such proposals
should be openly challenged on the grounds that they fundamentally misperceive the racial realities of
American life.
the law is obviously problematic, but that’s a reason we should hold it
accountable to live up to its ideals
Kimberle Crenshaw 88, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331,
lexis
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The
implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating
possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively
indeterminate. Furthermore,
trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in
reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when
we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection
has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law
because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating
function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as
the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided
because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics
offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric
has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change , one which does not reinforce existing
patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine
that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367]
excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and
a challenge to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the
institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be
ineffective . 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis.
Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by
using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a
contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality . The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the
contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is
triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent
contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because
Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American
society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series
of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination.
Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false,
civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the
“rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks
relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting
formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the
dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and
limited by legitimation.
a dialectical process of revolutionary reforms is necessary---the aff is a
concrete expression of a more systemic critique
Ben Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/
We need revolutionary change. There’s no two ways about it – if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic
driving economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. ¶ But as I’ve discussed in the previous five parts of this
series, getting from where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations
of the capitalist economy and replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the world’s resources is not as simple
as declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the overthrow of
capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and one million people signed a further petition to
introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would move us closer to the
overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter.¶ Whilst having an end goal in sight is important, most people
don’t change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what could be done at some point in the future:
they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In other words, we
need to have ideas that build upon people’s lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy
system, we
need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have to help rather than
hinder a move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist
system.¶ The dialectic of reform and revolution¶ What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms. Such a notion
would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as dichotomous, but
there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has shown that revolutionary transformations have
always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid, revolutionary movements and more
institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been motivated by the immediate needs
of the participants involved – ‘land, bread and peace’ being the first half of the slogan of the Russian Revolution. ¶ What does a strategy of
‘revolutionary
reforms’ entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political strategy that builds towards revolutionary
change by using reforms to ‘push up against the limits’ of the ‘logic of capitalism’ in practice :¶ “At first
these “feasible objectives” will be limited to reforms within capitalism—or at least to measures which, from
the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to be legitimate and achievable within the
system, but which may actually run counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its
limits. As the working class engages in struggle, however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and
aspirations are gradually revealed. At the same time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working
class learns about its capacity for “self-management, initiative and collective decision ” and can have a “foretaste of
what emancipation means”. In this way struggle for reform helps prepare the class psychologically,
ideologically and materially for revolution .” The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the
socialist movement:¶ “In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenin’s
pamphlet of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in 1937): the need for
transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the dialectic (not
antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum
programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that
the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.Ӧ So revolutionary
reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano
one and the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement
against capitalism”. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a ‘war of positon’.
has put it, “at
Political mobilization can help break down entrenched identity formations--separating issue of abolition from feminism fractures movements for
equality
Political mobilisation around suffering engenders solidarities between those who are suffering and those who
afford recognition of (and then action around) that suffering. Those who suffergenerally claim their common humanity with others in asking forpeople
to look beyond the specific circumstances of their suffer-ing, and in doing so, the
request is to address those specific
circumstances on the basis of a humanity not bound to the circumstances. The mistake of some forms
of identity politics, then, is to associate identity with suffering. While a recognition of historical
(and contemporary) suffering is an important aspect of the political process of seeking redress for the
conditions of suffering, it does not constitute identity singularly. ¶ “Wounded attachments”, we would argue, do
not representthe general condition of politicised identities, but rather, are prob-lematic constructions of identities which fail to
recognise (oraccept) the processes of change associated with movements. The accumulation of different sorts
of challenges around similar issues generally leads to the gradual amelioration of the condi-tions which
generated the identity (and the associated move-ment) in the first instance. If the emphasis in the movement is on identity
then successful reform (even partial reform) reduces the injury and thus diminishes the power of
the identity claim based upon that injury. This is because reform is necessarily uneven in terms of the impact it has. This
then poses a problem for those within the movement who would wish the reforms to go further and
who see in the reforms a weakening of the identity that they believe is a necessary prerequisite for political
action. As they can no longer mobilise the injured identity – and the associated suffering –
as common to all (and thus requiring address becauseof its generalised effect), there is often, then, a perceived need
to privilege that suffering as particular and to institute a politics of guilt with regard to
addressing it – truly the politics of ressentiment. ¶ The problems arise by insisting on the necessity
of political action being constituted through pre-existing identities and soli-darities (for example, those of being a woman).
If, instead, it was recognised that equality for women is not separable from (or achievable separated
from) wider issues of justice and equality within society then reforms could be seen as steps towards
equality . A movement concerned with issues of social justice (of whichgender justice is an integral aspect) would
allow for provisional reforms to prevailing conditions of injustice without calling into question the basis
for the movement – for there would always be more to be achieved . 8 Each achievement would itself
necessitate further revision of what equality would look like. And it would also necessitate revision of the particular aims that
constitute the “identity” afforded by participating in that movement. In this way, identity becomes more
appropriately understood as being, in part at least, about participating in a series of dialogues about what
is desired for the future in terms of understandings of social justice. ¶ Focusing on the future, on how we would like things
to be tomorrow, based on an understanding of where we are today, would allow for partial reforms to be seen as gains and not threats. It is only if
one believes that political action can only occur in the context of identification of past injustices as
opposed to future justice that one has a problem with (partial) reforms in the present. Political identity which
exists only through an enunciation of its injury and does not seek to dissolve itself as an identity can lead
to the ossification of injured relations. The “wounded attachment” occurs when the politicised identity
can see no future without the injury also constituting an aspect of that future. Developing on the work of Brown, we
would argue that not only does a “reformed” identity politics need to be based upon desire for the future, but that that desire should actually
be a desire for the dissolution (in the future) of the identity claim. The complete success of the femi-nist movement, for instance,
would mean that feminists no longerexisted, as the conditions that caused people to become feministhad been addressed. Similarly, with the dalit
movement, its success would be measured by the dissolution of the identity of “dalit” as asalient political category. There would be no loss here, only a
gain.¶ As we have argued, following Mohanty ([1993] 2000) andNelson (1993), it is participation in the processing of one’s ownand other’s experiences
into knowledge about the world, in thecontext of communities that negotiate epistemological premises, which confers a notion of politicised identity.
Since it is an under-standing of “tomorrow” (what that would be, and how it is to beachieved) that establishes one as, for example,
a feminist, such an identity claim does not exclude others from participation, and it does not solicit the
reification of identity around the fact of historical or contemporary suffering. By removing these obstacles
to progress, the “tomorrow” that is the goal, is more readily achievable. Identity politics , then, “ needs a
tomorrow ” in this sense: that the raison d’être of any politicised identity is the bringing about of a tomorrow in
which the social injustices of the present have been overcome. But identity politics also needs that
tomorrow – today – in the sense that politicised identities need to inscribe that tomorrow into their selfdefinition in the present, in order to avoid consolidating activity around the maintenance of the identity
rather than the overcoming of the conditions that generated it. That the tomorrow to be inscribed – today – in the selfdefinition of one’s political identity, is one in which that identity will no longer be required, is not a situation to be regretted, since it is rather the
promise of success for any movement for justice.
2AC K
FW
Using technical discourse strategically is key to solve the K
Mary Caprioli 4, Dept. of Political Science @ the University of Tennessee, PhD from the University of
Connecticut, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International
Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 253-269
We should learn from the research of feminist scholars to engage in a dialogue that can be understood . Carol Cohn
(1987), for example, found that one could not be understood or taken seriously within the national security arena
without using a masculine-gendered language. In other words, a common language is necessary to understand and be understood. This insight
could be applied to feminist research within international relations. Why not, as Charlotte Hooper (2001:10) suggests, make "strategic use of [expert
jargon ] to gain credibility for feminist arguments (or otherwise subvert it for feminist ends)." Little justification exists for
abandoning the liberal empiricists who reason that "the problem of developing better knowledge lies not
with the scientific method itself but with the biases in the ways in which our theories have been focused and
developed" (Tickner 2001:13).
Perm Solves
Utilize rage as a means to mobilize legalization movements---targeted rage
is key
Julia Lesage, 1985, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson and Grossberg,
http://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/womensRage.html
Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles demand our participation. Yet how,
specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women move into action? How does change occur? What political strategies should feminists
pursue? How, in our political work, can we constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender oppresses women? In
1981 I visited Nicaragua with the goal of finding out how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us
everything," I was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond home and children." In fact,
many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most enthusiastic supporters. For example, they
form over 50 percent of the popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense against United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa
Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and child abuse. Yet in Nicaragua we still see maids, the double standard sexually,
dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare. Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of an
extremely idealized notion of motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because
Nicaraguan women are very conscious of the power of their own revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the Vietnamese and
Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women militants are looking at women's role in the Salvadoran revolution. Because of
the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary for their survival, but the women also want to combat, in
an organized and self-conscious way, specific aspects of male supremacy in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in Nicaragua, women's
daily conversation is about the politics of daily life. They talk to each other often, complaining about men and about managing the domestic sphere.
Women's talk also encompasses complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United
States that conversation usually circulates pessimistically, if supportively, around the same themes and may even serve to reconfirm women's stasis
within these unpleasant situations. Here such conversation offers little sense of social change; yet in our recent political history, feminists have used
this preexisting social form--women's conversation in the domestic sphere--to create consciousness-raising groups. But to what degree is consciousness
raising sufficient to change women's behavior, including our self-conception and our own colonized minds? We
do not live in a
revolutionary situation in the United States. There is no leftist political organization here providing leadership and a cohesive strategy,
and in particular the struggle against women's oppression is not genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a context,
women need to work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our revolutionary consciousness and to empower us to
act on our own strategic demands. That is, we need to promote self-conscious, collectively supported, and
politically clear articulations of our anger and rage. Furthermore, we must understand the different structures behind different
women's rage. Black women rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism. Lesbians rage against heterosexual
privilege, including their denial of civil rights. Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the United States. If, in our
political work, we know this anger and the structures that generate it, we can more genuinely encounter each other and more extensively acknowledge
each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression. If we do not understand the unique social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we
run the risk of divisiveness, of fragmenting our potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different women's
anger is the precondition of our finding a way to work together toward common goals. I think a lot about the phenomenon of the colonized mind.
Everything that I am and want has been shaped within a social process marked by male dominance and female submission. How can women come to
understand and collectively attack this sexist social order? We all face, and in various ways incorporate into ourselves, sexist representations, sexist
modes of thought. Institutionally, such representations are propagated throughout culture, law, medicine, education, and so on. All families come up
against and are socially measured by sexist concepts of what is "natural"--that is, the "natural" roles of mother, children, or the family as a whole. Of
particular concern to me is the fact that I have lived with a man for fifteen years while I acutely understand the degree to which heterosexuality itself is
socially constructed as sexist. That is, I love someone who has more social privilege than me, and he has that privilege because he is male. As an
institution, heterosexuality projects relations of dominance and submission, and it leads to the consequent devaluation of women because of their sex.
The institution of heterosexuality is the central shaping factor of many different social practices at many different levels--which range, for example,
from the dependence of the mass media on manipulating sexuality to the division of labor, the split between the public and private spheres, and the
relations of production under capitalism. Most painfully for women, heterosexuality is a major, a social and psychological mode of organizing,
generating, focusing, and institutionalizing desire, both men's and women's. Literally, I am wedded to my own oppression. Furthermore, the very body
of woman is not her own--it has been constructed by medicine, the law, visual culture, fashion, her mother, her household tasks, her reproductive
capacity, and what Ti-Grace Atkinson has called "the institution of sexual intercourse." When I look in the mirror, I see my flaws; I evaluate the show I
put on to others. How do I break through representations of the female body and gain a more just representation of my body for and of myself? My
social interactions are shaped by nonverbal conventions which we all have learned unconsciously and which are, as it were, the glue of social life. As
Nancy Henley describes it in Body Politics, women's nonverbal language is characterized by shrinking, by taking up as little space as possible. Woman
is accessible to be touched. When she speaks in a mixed group, she is likely to be interrupted or not really listened to seriously, or she may be thought of
as merely emotional. And it is clear that not only does the voyeuristic male look shape most film practice, but this male gaze, with all its power, has a
social analog in the way eye contact functions to control and threaten women in public space, where women's freedom is constrained by the threat of
rape. We need to articulate these levels of oppression so as to arrive at a collective, shared awareness of these aspects of women's lives. We also need to
understand how we can and already do break through barriers between us. In our personal relations, we often overcome inequalities between us and
establish intimacy. Originally, within the women's movement we approached the task of coming together both personally and politically through the
strategy of the consciousness-raising group, where to articulate our experience as women itself became a collective, transformative experience. But
these groups were often composed mostly of middle-class women, sometimes predominantly young, straight, single, and white. Now we need to think
more clearly and theoretically about strategies for negotiating the very real power differences between us. It is not so impossible. Parents do this with
children, and vice versa; lovers deal with inequalities all the time. The aged want to be in communion with the young, and third-world women have
constantly extended themselves to their white sisters. However, when women come together in spite of power differences among them, they feel anxiety
and perhaps openly express previously suppressed hostility. Most likely, such a coming together happens when women work together intensively on a
mutual project so that there is time for trust to be established. Yet as we seek mutually to articulate the oppression that constrains us, we have found
few conceptual or social structures through which we might authentically express our rage. Women's
anger is pervasive, as pervasive
as our oppression, but it frequently lurks underground. If we added up all of women's depression--all our compulsive smiling,
ego-tending, and sacrifice; all our psychosomatic illness, and all our passivity--we could gauge our rage's unarticulated, negative force. In the
sphere of cultural production there are few dominant ideological forms that allow us even to think
"women's rage." As ideological constructs, these forms end up containing women. Women's rage is most often seen in the narratives that
surround us. For example: Classically, Medea killed her children because she was betrayed by their father. Now, reverse-slasher movies let the raped
woman pick up the gun and kill the male attacker. It is a similar posture of dead end vengeance. The news showed Patty Hearst standing in a bank with
a gun embodying that manufactured concept "terrorist," and then we saw her marrying her FBI bodyguard long after her comrades went up in flames.
In melodrama and film noir, as well as in pornography, women's anger is most commonly depicted through displacement onto images of female
insanity or perversity, often onto a grotesque, fearful parody of lesbianism. These displacements allow reference to and masking of individual women's
rage, and that masked rage is rarely collectively expressed by women or even fully felt. We have relatively few expressions of women's authentic rage
even in women's art. Often on the news we will see a pained expression of injustice or the exploitative use of an image of a third- world woman's grief.
Such images are manipulated purely for emotional effect without giving analysis or context. Some great feminist writers and speakers such as Mary
Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman have provided models by which we can understand ourselves, but too
often the very concept of "heroine" means that we hold up these women and their capacity for angry self-expression as the exception rather than the
rule. In Illinois, women
chained themselves together in the state house when it was clear that the ERA would not pass; the
such as these
often have little effect beyond their own time span. We need to think beyond such forms to more socially
effective ones. It is a task open to all our creativity and skill--to tap our anger as a source of energy and to focus it
aesthetically and politically. We may have to combine images of anger with something else--say, images of how women can construct the
women sought to express our collective anger at our legislators' cowardice and to do so in a conspicuous, public way. But actions
collectivity as a whole. It is here that, by their example, our third-world sisters have often taken the lead. Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the
bus, Harriet Tubman leading slaves to the North, an Angolan mother in uniform carrying a baby and a rifle, a Vietnamese farmer tilling and defending
her land, Nicaraguan women in their block committees turning in wife abusers to the police--these images let us see that women
can gain
more for themselves than merely negating the bad that exists. And it is in their constant need to attack both sexism and
racism, as well as poverty and imperialist aggression, that third-world feminists now make us all see much more clearly both the urgent need for and
the possibility of reconstructing the whole world on new terms. Artistically, emotionally, and politically women seem to need to glimpse dialectically the
transcendence of our struggle against sexism before we can fully express sexism's total negation, that is, our own just rage. Sometimes our
suppressed rage feels so immense that the open expression of it threatens to destroy us. So we often do not
experience anger directly and consciously, nor do we accurately aim our rage at its appropriate target. To
transcend negation and to build on it means that we have to see what is beyond our rage . An example of such
transcendence was demonstrated by Nicaraguan mothers of "martyred" soldiers (those killed by U.S.-paid counterrevolutionaries) to Pope John Paul II when he visited Managua in April 1983. They stood in the
rows closest to the podium where the Pope spoke and they all bore large photos of their dead children. As the events of the day unfolded, the women created an image that stirred the whole people, one that the
Pope could not go beyond or even adequately respond to. Here is what happened: The Pope spoke on and on to the gathered crowd about obeying the hierarchy and not getting involved with the things of this
world. In frustration and anger, the women began to shout, "We want peace," and their chant was taken up by the 400,000 others there. The women's rage at personal loss was valorized by the Nicaraguan people
as a whole, as the grieving mother became a collective symbol of the demand for peace. The chant, "We want peace," referred simultaneously to national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, religion, and family life. The
women spoke for the whole. This brings me back to my original question about women's political action in the United States today. One of the major areas of investigation and struggle in the women's movement
has been the sphere of daily life. This struggle, represented by an early women's movement phrase--"the personal is the political"--derives from women's real material labor in the domestic sphere and in the
sphere of social relations as a whole. Women have traditionally done the psychological labor that keeps social relations going. In offices, in neighborhoods, at home, they often seek to make the social environment
safe and "better," or more pleasant. That such labor is invisible, particularly that it is ignored within leftist theory and practice, is one of the more precise indices of women's oppression. And it is feminists'
sensitivity to and analysis of social process that clarifies for them the sexism on the Left. Often at a leftist conference or political meeting, many men continue to see women and women's concerns as "other," and
they do not look at what the Left could gain from feminist theory or from women's subcultural experience or from an analysis of women's labor. Women who come to such an event have already made a
commitment to learn and to contribute, so they make an effort to continue along with the group as a whole but are impeded by sexist speakers' intellectual poverty (e.g., use of the generic "he"), macho debating
style, and distance from political activism. Furthermore, not only women feel this political invisibility at leftist events. When black labor and black subcultural experience in the United States is not dealt with, nor
is imperialism, or when racism is theoretically subsumed under the rubric of "class oppression" and not accorded its specificity, then third-world participants face the same alienation. To demonstrate this process
and analyze what divides us, I will describe an incident that occurred at the Teaching Institute on Marxist Cultural Theory in June 1983. It is worth discussing because it is the kind of incident that happens all too
often among us on the Left. Early in that summer session, a coalition of students and the two women faculty members, Gayatri Spivak and me, formed to present a protest statement to the faculty. It was read in
every class. Here is what it said: The Marxist-Feminist Caucus met on Friday June 17th and concluded that the "limits, frontiers and boundaries" of Marxist cultural theory as articulated by the Teaching Institute
excluded and silenced crucial issues of sexism, racism and other forms of domination. We find ourselves reproducing in the classrooms of the Teaching Institute the very structures which are the object of our
critique. The Marxist-Feminist Caucus therefore proposes that each class set aside an hour weekly to discuss strategic silences and structural exclusions. A Marxism that does not problematize issues of gender and
race, or of class consciousness in its own ranks, cannot hope to be an adequate tool for either social criticism or social transformation. The institute had a format of having famous Marxist intellectuals lecture,
specifically males with job security who have never incorporated a feminist analysis into their theoretical work. Both the format and the content of their lectures enraged some of us, but not others. In a sense,
writing a protest statement divided the school's participants between the political ones and the consumers of Marxist theory. This is because critical theory itself has become a pathway for elitist advancement in
the humanities and social sciences in universities where these areas are facing huge cutbacks. And the canon of that critical theory is based on Marx and Freud and their contemporary interpretants, Althusser and
Lacan. Both at the Teaching Institute and at prestigious universities, young academics could get their quick fix of Marxism, the knowledge of which could help greatly in their academic career. This is a capitalist
mode of consuming knowledge. Too many students, especially career- pressured graduate students, want only a well conceived lecture, a digest of Marxist theory and social analysis, something that can be written
in a notebook, taken home, and quoted from in a future paper or journal article. Furthermore, we intellectuals fall into this capitalist competitive mode. We feel pressured inside ourselves to be the best. Students
are told to buy the best. All the faculty at the Teaching Institute felt that they could not make a mistake, that they had to read and show they had read everything, that they had been challenged on their political
practice, accused of being racist or sexist or undemocratic. Our control over the classroom and studied theoretical polish became a kind of professional hysteria and worked against the collective building of
Marxist knowledge and theory that we have needed for more effective social change. Since the early 1970s women have come together in meetings like these, in feminist seminars, caucuses, and workshops, partly
in resistance to a certain macho leftist or academic style and partly to build a new body of knowledge and feminist political practice. And we have been successful at doing this but it has meant double or triple work
for us. Feminist scholarship does not usually lead to academic promotion for a woman. The knowledge women produce is easily marginalized, as was made painfully obvious at that summer school. Feminists and
third-world students came to the Teaching Institute knowing how much they needed Marxist theory. They understood that abolishing capitalism and imperialism was the precondition for liberation. They came as
political participants expecting to learn theoretical tools to use in fighting oppression. But sex and race were too often ignored--I would say stupidly ignored--as social determinants in the theories presented about
social change. (Beyond that, students felt intimidated by name-dropping and teachers' and other students' failure to explain terms. They felt they had to give a polished rebuttal or a cohesive "strategic
intervention" before they could speak to refute a lecturer's point.) And when students raised issues of sexism or racism, deflection became the all too frequent tactic used by teachers or some of the white male
students in response. No wonder that women, with their sex-role socialization, were often too intimidated to speak. This is a sad analysis, but not an infrequent one in academia. It speaks about political theory and
academic sexism and racism, and elitism and class privilege. The incident reveals much of what divides politically progressive people in the United States. These differences must be acknowledged in depth if we
are to work together politically in a coalition form. In particular, I understand the texture of women's silence in a forum that demanded a highly rational and developed intervention. Many of the women students
at the Teaching Institute already produced feminist theory, but the intimidating nature of this kind of aggressive public speaking made them seem like nonparticipants. And it often happens to me, too. I know that
we watch and despair of our own colonized psyches which hold us back in silence precisely when we would choose to be political actors, especially in a Marxist forum. What we have seen in the 1970s and 1980s in
North America and Europe is a supercession of political forms related to developments in radical consciousness. Conditions have evolved in the United States that make it impossible to conceive of a revolutionary
organizing strategy that does not embrace a black and minority revolution and a feminist revolution. The lesson of the civil rights/black power movement was that blacks will organize autonomously. Now it is the
offspring of that movement, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, that has taken the lead in building an anti-imperialist coalition that addresses the specific struggles and organizing forms of blacks, Latinos, women,
and gays. Such a coalition relates to the existence of the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the anti-imperialist movement, by supporting these groups' autonomous organizing and granting new
respect, not by subsuming or controlling them. Furthermore, at this point in U.S. history, issues of mass culture and mass communication have to be dealt with, so that minority figures such as Jesse Jackson or
Harold Washington, Chicago's black major, have developed an ongoing analysis about racism in the press. As a feminist who has worked both in the cultural sphere and in anti-imperialist work, I have experienced
this supercession of forms. In the early 1970s a politically active woman was either "on the Left" or "in the independent women's movement." Some socialist feminists within leftist organizations formed caucuses
to try to influence their organizations. In the 1970s I chose to work mostly within the independent women's movement, especially in creating a women's studies program at an urban university. In developing
feminist media now within the women's movement, I find many of my sisters addressing broader issues of imperialism, racism, class oppression, and the nuclear threat. Many of us are joining progressive
coalitions around these issues. Within these coalitions we must be able openly to declare, "I am a feminist and our feminist position represents the most advanced stand. You men have to join us." Indeed, many
men, often younger men, have. As feminists, we are the ones who are building a whole theoretical critique of mass culture and mass communication; we are the ones who are learning how to appropriate all of
culture in an oppositional way. And because of our historical position in advanced capitalism, we are one of the first social movements to address cultural issues in such a thorough and complex way. Many
feminists are eager to participate in coalitions, the major political strategy for us in the 1 980s. In Chicago, we saw the women's movement and the Left work to elect Harold Washington. In the San Francisco area,
gays and lesbians have formed a Central America support group. Both in the United States and abroad, the antinuclear movement contains within it all-women's affinity groups. Latinos in various areas identify
and organize as Puerto Rican or Mexican-American according to their ethnic origins and concentration, and also unite in Central American solidarity work. This great diversity of sectoral organizing enriches all of
us who are working for social change. Some of the best aspects of current progressive organizing have, in fact, derived specifically from the development of the contemporary women's movement. I mentioned the
consciousness-raising groups earlier. I think the women's movement has introduced into political discourse an open and direct critique of the macho style and political posturing of many male leaders. As feminist
activists, we have created among ourselves new forms of discussion and a creative, collective pursuit of knowledge--in contrast to an older, more aggressive, male debating style. Particularly important for me, the
women's movement has pursued and validated as politically important cultural and artistic work. In Chicago, where I live, I experience a strong continuum and network among community-based artists and
women in the art world. We have built up intellectual ties between academic women and feminist film- and videomakers who have created an analysis of how sexuality is manipulated in the visual culture that
surrounds us. As a consequence, feminist film criticism has developed a new theoretical framework for analyzing ideology and the mass media. In fact, I think that our building of a feminist cultural theory has
consider how unleashing our anger might capacitate
us to act for change, I reconsider Frantz Fanon's essay "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth. In that essay he describes
made a key contribution to the Left and to revolutionary movements throughout the world. When I want to
decolonization, particularly the process by which the native sheds the colonizer's values and the colonizer's ways. I understand that my black and Latina
sisters in the United States experience a rage against the economic and racial violence perpetrated every day against them; in a way that is
similar to what Fanon describes: this rage knows its resolution lies in a complete change of the economic order in which we live. At the same time, I
must ask
what kind of rage it would be that would effectively contest women's oppression --given all the levels at
which gender inequality and women's oppression is articulated in social and personal life. What Fanon describes to us is a specific historical moment at
which mental colonization can be and is surpassed. As I look at women's mental colonization, I see our internalized sense of powerlessness, our
articulation into masochistic structures of desire, and our playing out of personae that on the surface seem "passive," "self-defeating," "irrational,"
"hesitant," "receptively feminine," or even "crazy." Much of this behavior stems from internalized and suppressed rage. Fanon describes such behavior
in the colonized and posits active rage, the violent response to violence, as its cure. What would the overturning of male supremacy and women's
colonization mean to women? How would it be accomplished? Fanon understands that a whole social structure and a new kind of person must come
into being, and that those with privilege know, fear, and resist this. His call to armed struggle, based on the very clear demarcations and abuses of
power that the native always sees, signals a survival struggle that does not characterize the war between the sexes . As
I read Fanon for what he can teach me about women's resistance to oppression in nonrevolutionary society, I read him as a communist psychiatrist
talking about how social movements can change the mentality of the oppressed. When I ask about revolution for women now, minimally I see that our
contestation cannot be conducted in the mode of nice girls, of managing the egos of and patiently teaching those who oppress, which is a skill and duty
we learned from our mothers in the domestic sphere. If we do so, once again we will be placed in that very role of "helpmate" that we are trying to
overcome. Angry contestation may take us the extra step needed to overcome our own colonized behavior and
tardy response. Let me now rewrite for you parts of Fanon's essay to show its power when discussing the relation between psychological and social
change. The
distance between the violence of colonization and its necessary response in armed struggle, and
the emotional rage I am referring to here in combating sexism, marks the distance between the periphery and
the center of international capitalism. By using Fanon in this way, I do not wish to co-opt him for the women's movement but to learn from him,
just as I learned from the Nicaraguan women's courage and tenacity. If women must learn to be openly angry, we must learn to draw links between
ourselves and those who are more oppressed, to learn new methods of struggle and courageous response. Combating women's oppression as we know it
is a historical process: that is to say, it cannot become intelligible or clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements that
give it historical form and content. Combating women's oppression is the meeting of two intrinsically opposed forces, which in fact owe this originality
to that sort of substantification that results from and is nourished by the social construction of gender. The husband is right when he speaks of knowing
"them" well--for it is men who perpetuate the function of wife. Men owe the reproduction of their bodies and psyches to the family. Feminist revolution
never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms passive femininity crushed with inessentiality
into privileged agency under the floodlights of history. A new kind of woman brings a new rhythm into existence with a new language and a new
humanity; combating women's oppression means the veritable creation of new women who become fully human by the same process by which they
freed themselves. Feminists who decide to put their program into practice and become its moving force are ready to be constantly enraged. They have
collectively learned that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called into question by absolute contestation. The sex-gender system
is a world divided into compartments. And if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at last be able to reveal the lines of force it
implies and to mark out the lines on which a nonoppressive society will be reorganized. At
the level of individuals, anger is a
cleansing force. It frees the woman from her inferiority complex and from despair and inaction; it makes her fearless and restores her selfrespect. At this point I will stop citing from and reworking Fanon, deliberately at the point of individual rage. Now is a
time when we need to work in coalitions, but we must be very honest about what divides us and what are
the preconditions we need before we can work together. I have made the decision to work in leftist and feminist cultural work
and in Latin American solidarity work. I think in all our strategies we must analyze the relation of that strategy to feminist, antiracist, and antiimperialist demands. Women comprise over half the population; any class issues in the United States are intimately tied to the question of racism; we
all live off the labor of workers, often underpaid women, in the Third World; and socialist revolution is being waged very near us. Personally, I know
that it is by my contact with Nicaraguan women, who insist that men and women must struggle together for our mutual liberation, that I have been
politically and emotionally renewed. The problems grow more acute. We know that the Right is racist, homophobic, and sexist. We in the
women's
movement must stop turning our anger against each other and learn the most effective ways to work
together for social change. We can focus our anger and harness it , but to do that we must clearly analyze
cause and effect. If theory accompanies anger, it will lead to effective solutions to the problems at hand. We
have great emotional and social power to unleash when we set loose our all too often suppressed rage, but we may only feel free to do so when we know
that we can use our anger in an astute and responsible way.
Abdication of legal reformism makes concrete challenges to material
barriers to feminism impossible
Crawford 7 [ 1-1-2007 Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography
and the Praxis of Pleasure Bridget J. Crawford Pace University School of Law, bcrawford@law.pace.edu]
CONCLUSION In spite of third-wave feminism’s appeal, at this point in its development, third-wave feminism lacks an overall theoretical
view of how the law functions. Third-wave feminism is largely a reactive critique that fails to advance its own
positivistic view of how certain goals should be accomplished . Third-wave feminists respond to incomplete and distorted images of
second-wave feminism. Their indictment of second-wave feminism has led to a significant tension between older and younger feminists. Gloria Steinem, for one, has said that
when reading third-wave feminist writings, she feels "like a sitting dog being told to sit."384 Women on the younger cusp of second-wave feminism, who demographically are
not part of the third wave, report that they feel adrift between the competing "waves."385 And even some younger women, perhaps articulating the most decidedly third-wave
stance of all, state that they do not want selfidentity as part of a "third-wave" of feminism, because that identification implies a group affiliation or branding that should be
third-wave feminism is a helpful elaboration of
some of the issues first raised by earlier feminists, but that it is not so decidedly different from what has come before. Third-wave feminism's
emphasis on personal pleasure, the fluidity of gender roles, the internet and coalition-building contribute to the feminist conversation, but third-wave feminists
have not yet altered the terms and conditions of that conversation . It remains for lawyers and legal theorists
to take up the challenge from this generation of young women to develop laws that enhance women’s
autonomy and well-being.
rejected in favor of a third-wave embrace of individualism. So one is left with the sense that
Feminist critiques of the state get coopted to justify neoliberal deregulation--engagement is key
Rahila Gupta 12, freelance journalist and writer, Has neoliberalism knocked feminism sideways?,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/rahila-gupta/has-neoliberalism-knocked-feminism-sideways
Feminism needs to recapture the state from the neoliberal project to which it is in hock in order to make it deliver for
women. It must guard against atomisation and recover its transformative aspirations to shape the new social
order that is hovering on the horizon, says Rahila Gupta¶ How should feminists read our current times? A major economic crisis rocks the developed
world. While austerity measures don’t appear to be working across Europe, the mildly Keynesian efforts of Obama to kick-start the US economy have
had only a marginal effect. The Occupy movement has gone global and the public disorder in the summer, with more disorder being predicted by the
police, are an indication of deep discontent with the system. Yet we have seen an enthusiastic and vibrant third wave of youthful feminism emerge in
the past decade. At the rate at which these waves arise, it will be some time before the rock of patriarchy will be worn smooth.¶ The current phase of
capitalism – neo-liberalism – which began with Thatcher and Reagan in the 1970s, promotes privatisation and deregulation in order to safeguard the
freedom of the individual to compete and consume without interference from a bloated state. According to David Harvey, a Marxist academic, the
world stumbled towards neo-liberalism in response to the last major recession in the 70s when ‘the uneasy compact between capital and labour
brokered by an interventionist state’ broke down. The UK government, for example, was obliged by the International Monetary Fund to cut expenditure
on the welfare state in order to balance the books. The post-war settlement had given labour more than its due, and it was time for the upper classes to
claw these gains back. ¶ The fact that second wave feminism and neoliberalism flourished from the 1970s onwards has led some to argue, notably Nancy
Fraser, that feminism ‘served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society’ . I am with Nancy Fraser in
so far as she says that there is a convergence, a coinciding of second wave feminism and neo-liberalism, even that feminism thrived in these conditions.
It is well known that in
an attempt to renew and survive, capitalism co-opts the opposition to its own ends. If
part of the project of neoliberalism is to shrink the size of the state, it serves its purpose to co-opt the
feminist critique that the state is both paternalistic and patriarchal. Critiques of the nanny state from the right may chime
with feminist concerns. However, the right has little to say about patriarchy. What is left out of the co-option process is equally significant. The
critique of the state mounted by feminists such as Elizabeth Wilson when state capitalism was at the height of its
powers suited neoliberal capitalists seeking deregulation and a reduced role for the state. ¶ Fraser’s analysis does
not explain the current resurgence of feminism at a time when the shine of neoliberalism has faded. It is not so much that feminism legitimised
neoliberalism, but that neoliberal values created a space for a bright, brassy and ultimately fake feminism - the ‘I really, really want’ girl-power ushered
in by the Spice Girls. This transitional period between second wave and the current wave of feminism (which some commentators characterised as postfeminist) represented the archetypal appropriation of the feminist agenda, shorn of its political context, by neoliberalism. Incidentally, many of us
rejected the label post-feminist because it felt like an attempt to chuck feminism into the dustbin of history and to deny the continuing need for it. In
hindsight, there was something different going on in that lull between the two waves in the 70s and 80s and today; the voice of feminism was being
drowned out by its loud, brassy sisters.¶ If the culture of neoliberalism
had something to offer women, it was the idea of
agency, of choice freely exercised, free even of patriarchal restraints. It emphasised self-sufficiency of the individual
while at the same time undermining those collective struggles or institutions which make self-sufficiency
possible. The world was your oyster – all you needed to do was compete successfully in the marketplace. The flexible worker, in order to make
herself acceptable to the world of work, may even go so far as to remodel herself through cosmetic surgery, all the while under the illusion that she was
in control of her life. In her essay on ‘Feminism’ in a forthcoming book, Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Clare Chambers argues that liberal
capitalism is committed to what she calls the ‘ fetishism of choice’ . If women choose things that disadvantage
them and entrench differences, it legitimates inequality because the inequality arises from the choices
they make. The few women who do well out of the sex industry do not believe that their work entrenches
inequality because it is freely chosen, because prostitution is seen as a liberation from the drudgery of
cleaning jobs. Choice is their weapon against feminist objections. In their so-called free expression of their sexuality, they are
challenging nothing in the neoliberal schema because the work reduces women to the status of meat and
commodity.
Young Votes for Perm
young votes for the perm
Schlosberg and Dryzek 2—David Schlosberg Poli Sci @ Northern Arizona and John Dryzek
Social and Political Theory @ Australian Nat’l [Political Strategies of American Environmentalism:
Inclusion and Beyond” Society and Natural Resources 15 p. 796-798]
Dual Strategies: Inclusion and Opposition Environmental activism in an oppositional public sphere , which has
grown in large measure as a result of disillusion with the results of inclusion, demonstrates that the life of environmentalism can go on beyond the
state. Among
political theorists who have contemplated the question of inclusion versus opposition, most conclude that social
movements should operate both inside and outside the state . Referring to the exemplary case of the
women’s movement, Cohen and Arato believed that ``The dual logic of feminist politics . . . involves a
communicative, discursive politics of identity and influence that targets civil and political society and an
organized, strategically rational politics of inclusion and reform that is aimed at political and economic institutions’’ (Cohen
and Arato 1992, 550). For Cohen and Arato, the justi®cation of the dual strategy is largely the well-being of civil society: Groups or their
supporters influential within the state would help build a constitutional, legal, and policy context for the
movement outside. Hilary Wainwright (1994) reached the same conclusion from a more instrumental perspective. Action within the state is
needed to supply collective decisions with ``binding national and international authority’’ (p. 195), but without the movement outside, such policy
Young , arguing against those who pin their hopes on civil society rather than the
state , concluded that ``social movements seeking greater justice and well-being should work on both
these fronts , and aim to multiply the links between civil society and states’ ’ (Young 2000, 156). A number of movement
action is unlikely (p. 197). Iris
activists also advocate a dual strategy. David Brower, the leading American environmentalist of the 20th century, was fond of saying that he was glad
someone like Dave Foreman (founder of Earth First!) came along, because it made Brower’s position seem more reasonable. Brower’s own then-radical
presence was once praised in identical terms by moderate environmentalist Russell Train. Mark Dowie (telephone conversation with the author, 26
August 1999) argued that such a recognition is becoming more widespread in the U.S. movement: ``I think wise people at both levels, grass roots and
national, value the work of the other side and see ways of partnering and working together on some of these issues. . . . I think there is a certain
maturity coming now in the movement that has accepted the work of the different styles and different tactics of different people with the same
objective.’’ It is easy enough to conclude in the abstract that a dual strategy emphasizing both state and public sphere is desirable for any social
movement. As Dryzek (1996a, 119), argued, the ``happiest conceivable outcome may be a clear separation between two environmental movements: one
within the state to take advantage of every bit of flexibility in the liberal democratic system, another outside, more democratic and vital.’’ But this is too
easy a conclusion to reach; not all situations feature a mix of compatibility and contradiction in the relationship between movement interest and state
imperative of the sort that makes a dual strategy compelling. Let us consider the times when a dual strategy may not be appropriate. First and most
obviously, a
movement will not be able to follow a dual strategy if it confronts a truly exclusive state ; oppositional
situation is rare in the U nited States. While the Reagan administration in its
early years tried to expel environmentalists from the state, the effort failed because of the variety of access
channels (notably to Congress) that the administration did not control. Second, if a movement’s resources are scarce, it may not
civil society may be the only option. This
have enough to devote adequately to both the long march through the institutions and activism in the public sphere, both of which can be both
demanding and frustrating. Third, if a movement’s de®ning interest can be attached to an established or emerging state imperative, then
thoroughgoing entry into the state may be a good bargain. So while we endorse an engagement with dual strategies, we argue for a more re¯ective,
situational understanding of such engagement. We are not arguing that everything can be accomplished in civil society, nor are we arguing that all
movements should adopt a dual strategy.4 We are simply noting that movements with limited resources should examine situations in order to identify
where those resources are best spent, on which issues, and at which time. A blanket exhortation to engage in a dual strategy does not fit all situations
equally. If some but not all of a movement’s defining interest can be attached to an established or emerging state imperative, while other aspects of that
interest challenge an imperative, a dual strategy is clearly desirable.5 The content of these imperatives matters a great deal when it comes to movement
strategy and movement prospects. We next argue that both
economic and legitimation imperatives can be bent in a
direction that allows a closer connection between movement interests and state imperatives than has been
seen in the United States since the early 1970s. Interest in pollution control and conservation of material
resources can be attached to the economic imperative via the idea of ecological modernization. Interest in
public participation and public health can be linked to the legitimation imperative through emerging
notions of environmental risks and their consequences. However, we also show why such attachments are currently blocked in
the United States in comparison with some Western European countries which helps to explain why the United States is now something of an
environmental policy laggard.
State Key to Feminism
State influence inevitable---only mobilizing focus on reforms can effectively
challenge patriarchy
R. W. Connell 90, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”, Theory and
Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, (Oct., 1990), pp. 507-544, http://www.jstor.org/stable/657562
Because of its power to regulate and its power to create, the state is a major stake in gender politics; and the exercise of that
power is a con- stant incitement to claim the stake . Thus the state becomes the focus of interest-group formation and
mobilization in sexual politics. It is worth recalling just how wide the liberal state's activity in relation to
gender is. This activity includes family policy, population policy, labor force and labor market management, housing policy, regulation of sexual behavior and expression,
provision of child care, mass educa- tion, taxation and income redistribution, the creation and use of mili- tary forces - and that is not the whole of it. This is not a sideline; it is a
Control of the machinery that conducts these activities is a massive asset in gender
politics . In many situations it will be tactically decisive . The state is therefore a focus for the
mobilization of interests that is central to gender politics on the large scale . Feminism's historical concern with the state, and attempts to capture a share of state power, appear in this light as a necessary response
to a historical reality . They are not an error brought on by an overdose of liberalism or a capitula- tion to
patriarchy . As Franzway puts it, the state is unavoidable for feminism. The question is not whether feminism will
deal with the state, but how: on what terms, with what tactics, toward what goals .5" The same is true of the
politics of homosexuality among men. The ear- liest attempts to agitate for toleration produced a half-illegal, half-aca- demic mode of organizing that reached its
major realm of state policy.
peak in Weimar Germany, and was smashed by the Nazis. (The Institute of Sexual Science was vandalized and its library burnt in 1933; later, gay men were sent to concentration
camps or shot.) A long period of lobbying for legal reform followed, punctuated by bouts of state repression. (Homosexual men were, for instance, targeted in the McCarthyite
The gay liberation movement changed the methods and expanded the goals to include
social revolution, but still dealt with the state over policing, de-criminalization, and anti-discrimination.
Since the early 1970s gay politics has evolved a complex mixture of confron- tation, cooperation, and
representation. In some cities, including San Francisco and Sydney, gay men as such have successfully run for public office. Around the AIDS crisis of
the 1980s, in countries such as the United States and Australia, gay community based organizations and state health services have
entered a close - if often tense - long-term relationship.' In a longer historical perspective, all these forms of politics are
fairly new. Fantasies like Aristophanes's Lysistrata aside, the open mobiliza- tion of groups around demands or programs in
sexual politics dates only from the mid-nineteenth century. The politics that characterized other patriarchal gender orders in history
were constructed along other lines, for instance as a politics of kinship, or faction formation in agri- cultural villages. It can plausibly be argued that modern patterns
re- sulted from a reconfiguration of gender politics around the growth of the liberal state. In particular its
structure of legitimation through plebiscite or electoral democracy invited the response of popular
mobilization
period in the United States.)
State influence is inevitable but depth of oppression matters---reform is
effective and only way to solve---they exaggerate state’s internal coherence
R. W. Connell 90, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”, Theory and
Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, (Oct., 1990), pp. 507-544, http://www.jstor.org/stable/657562
Appraisals Is the state patriarchal? Yes, beyond any argument, on the evidence dis- cussed above. It is not "essentially
patriarchal " or "male"; even if one could speak of the "essence" of a social institution, this would exaggerate
the internal coherence of the state . Rather the state is historically patriarchal, patriarchal as a matter of
concrete social practices . State structures in recent history institutionalize the European equation be- tween authority and a dominating masculinity; they are
effectively con- trolled by men; and they operate with a massive bias towards hetero- sexual men's interests. At the same time the pattern of state
patriarchy changes. In terms of the depth of oppression and the historical possibilities of resistance and
transformation, a fascist regime is crucially different from a liberal one, and a liberal one from a
revolutionary one. The most favorable histori- cal circumstance for progressive sexual politics seems to be
the early days of social-revolutionary regimes; but the later bureaucratization of these regimes is devastating. Next best is a liberal
state with a reformist government; though reforms introduced under its aegis are vulnerable in periods of
reaction. Though the state is patriarchal, progressive gender politics cannot avoid it . The character of the
state as the central institutionalization of power , and its historical trajectory in the regulation and
constitution of gender relations, make it unavoidably a major arena for challenges to patriarchy . Here
liberal feminism is on strong ground . Becoming engaged in practical struggles for a share of state power
requires tactical judgments about what developments within the state provide opportunities. In the 1980s
certain strategies of reform have had a higher relative pay-off than they did before. In Australia, for instance, the creation
of a network of "women's services" was a feature of the 1970s, and the momentum of this kind of action has died away. Reforms that have few budgetary implications but fit in
Equal employment opportunity and antidiscrimination legisla- tion have been highlighted; decriminalizing homosexuality is consistent with this.
with other state strategies, such as modernizing the bureaucracy, become more promi- nent.
AT: Marijuana Sexualizes Women
Their Chapkins card is about the SQ and proves the perm – legalization is
better – they homogenize all women with marijuana
Ann Friedman 13, Why Aren’t Women at Home in the World of Weed?, July 22,
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/07/why-arent-women-at-home-in-the-world-of-weed.html
I don’t expect to find many women who look like me taking bong rips under the fluorescent lights of the Anaheim
Convention Center. And I’m not surprised. Turns out the Kush Expo is like any other convention centered around what’s seen as
primarily a male interest: Lots of booths, lots of booth babes. One of them, CJ Hensley, is sporting a tiny shredded shirt with a pot
leaf on it and a black lace bra peeking through. There is a wreath of plastic pot leaves around the band of her bikini bottom.
“Dressing up is part of the fun,” she tells me. Hensley has been at the Kush Clean booth, selling pipe-cleaning products and antibacterial wipes to germophobic social smokers, for three years now — ever since she turned 18, “got a medical card and became a
proud stoner.” I ask her if men are always hitting on her. “Yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, “but I kind of ask for it. They’re usually
too stoned and happy to do anything weird.Ӧ I decide to seek out a few non-bikinied booth proprietors. Miranda Baskharoon,
who owns a couple of cigar shops in Southern California, is selling glass pipes and mini-vaporizers. She
says she gets a lot of women customers at her booth. “They approach me when they see a woman standing
back here,” she says. “I don’t feel that my bikini or my body sells the product. I don’t need to sell my body .”¶
Baskharoon introduces me to Stephanie, another vendor who’s selling THC-infused cupcakes she bakes herself. She has long,
wavy blonde hair and is wearing a spaghetti-strap sundress in a purple-paisley print. She and her husband, Buddy, have been selling
their potent snacks at various weed conventions for about a decade. Last year at Kush Expo, they won first and second place for best
edibles and concentrates. “Call us Mr. and Mrs. Nuggets,” she says, “because of the federal scrutiny.”
Many of her customers
are women who don’t fit the stoner stereotype — breast-cancer survivors and people with arthritis . Slowly
but surely more public-facing venues for weed culture, like the Kush Expo, are starting to reflect that cohort.
“As the years have gone by, the maturity has gone up,” Stephanie says. “I think the frat-party-ness has faded
away. Ӧ But even as the culture grows up and the industry becomes more professionalized, the sexism remains entrenched. The
leaders of most major drug-policy-reform groups are men — some of whom have a history of harassment. In a new research paper
on the gender dynamics of the marijuana-growing community in Northern California, sociologist Karen August found that “nearly
all” business transactions were made by men, while women are “heavily involved” in work like tending plants and making edibles.
She references Craigslist ads with titles like “Girl Trimmer Needed” and “lady trimmers wanted.” Several of the ads are overtly
sexual: “Need a good looking trimmer that is Dtf.” Or, “looking for new help, topless extra.” “There are a few successful women
growers,” August writes, “but more numerous are the smaller marijuana-related cottage industries operated by women” selling
paraphernalia, clothing, posters, and other knickknacks with marijuana themes. Precisely the sort of thing on sale at the Kush Expo.¶
As I look around, I see far more nearly naked women than female small-business owners. I approach Amber Kidd and Jennifer
Rodriguez, two tattooed girls with heavy eyeliner and metallic hot pants who are handing out stickers, and ask if they’re participating
in tomorrow’s Hot Kush Girl competition I saw on the billboard, which is advertising a $1,000 cash prize. Their shake their heads no
— not because it’s sexist but because they think it’s rigged. “I don’t participate,” Rodriguez says. “You get up there half-naked and do
whatever they tell you, and in the end someone’s girlfriend wins.” Even when you’re a hot kush girl, you don’t quite belong.
AT: Civil Society = Gendered
Public sphere not inevitably gendered---debates about public policy can
include embodied experience
Lincoln Dahlberg 5, The University of Queensland, Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, Visiting
Fellow, The Habermasian public sphere: Taking difference seriously?, Theory and Society (2005) 34:111126
I believe this critique of power, transparency, and the subject is largely based upon a poor characterization
of Habermas’ position. There are three main misunderstandings that need to be cleared up here, to do
with power as negative, as able to be easily removed, and as able to be clearly identified. First, Habermas
does not define power as simply negative and as therefore needing to be summarily removed from the
public sphere. The public sphere norm calls for “coercion-free communication” and not power-free
communication. Habermas emphasizes the positive power of communicative interaction within the public
sphere through which participants use words to do things and make things happen.60 Communicative
rationality draws on the “ force of better argument ” to produce more democratic citizens, culture, and
societies. Subjects are indeed molded through this constituting power, but their transformation is towards
freedom and autonomy rather than towards subjugation and normalization. As Jeffrey Alexander points
out, to act according to a norm is not the same as to be normalized .61 The public sphere norm provides a
structure through which critical reflection on constraining or dominating social relations and possibilities
for freedom can take place . As Chambers argues, rational discourse here is about “the endless
questioning of codes,” the reasoned questioning of normalization.62 This is the very type of questioning
critics like Lyotard, Mouffe, and Villa are engaged in despite claiming the normalizing and repressive
power of communicative rationality. These critics have yet to explain adequately how they escape this
performative contradiction, although they may not be too concerned to escape it.63
The form of power that is to be excluded from discourse in the public sphere is that which limits and
disables democratic participation and leads to communicative inequalities . Coercion and domination are
(ideally) excluded from the public sphere, which includes forms of domination resulting from the
maldistribution of material and authoritative resources that lead to discursive inequalities . This emphasis
on the ideal exclusion of coercion introduces the second point of clari- fication, that the domination free
public sphere is an idealization for the purposes of critique. Habermas is more than aware of the fact that,
as Nancy Fraser, Mouffe, and Young remind us, coercive forms of power, including those that result from
social inequality, can never be completely separated from the public sphere.64 Claims that such power has
been removed from any really-existing deliberative arena can only be made by ignoring or hiding the
operation of power. However, this does not mean that a reduction in coercion and domination cannot be
achieved. Indeed, this is precisely what a democratic politics must do. To aid this project, the public
sphere conception sets a critical standard for evaluation of everyday communication. Chambers puts
this nicely:
Criticism requires a normative backdrop against which we criticize. Crit-icizing the ways power and
domination play themselves out in discourse presupposes a conception of discourse in which there is no
[coercive] power and domination. In other words, to defend the position that there is a mean- ingful
difference between talking and fighting, persuasion and coercion, and by extension, reason and power
involves beginning with idealizations. That is, it involves drawing a picture of undominated discourse.65
However, this discussion of the idealizing status of the norm does notanswer claims that it invokes a
transparency theory of knowledge. Iwould argue that such claims not only fall prey to another performative contradiction – of presupposing that the use of rational discourse can establish the impossibility of
rational discourse revealing truth and power – but are also based on a poor reading of Habermas’ theory
of communicative rationality. This is the third point of clarification. In contrast to the metaphysics of
presence, the differentiation of persusion from coercion in the public sphere does not posit a naive theory
of the transparency of power, and meaning more generally. The public sphere conception as based upon
communicative rationality does not assume a Cartesian (autonomous, disembodied, decontextualized)
subject who can clearly distinguish between persuasion and coercion, good and bad reasons, true and
untrue claims, and then wholly re-move themselves and their communications from such influence. For
Habermas, subjects are always situated within culture. The public sphere is posited upon intersubjective
rather than subject-centered rationality. It is through the process of communicative rationality, and not
via a Cartesian subject, that manipulation, deception, poor reasoning, and so on, are identified and
removed, and by which meanings can be understood and communicated. In other words, it is through
rational-critical communication that discourse moves away from coercion or non-public reason towards
greater rational communication and a stronger public sphere. The circularity here is not a problem, as it
may seem, but is in fact the very essence of democratization: throughthe practice of democracy,
democratic practice is advanced.
This democratizing process can be further illustrated in the important and challenging case of social
inequalities. Democratic theorists (bothdeliberative and difference) generally agree that social inequalities
al-ways lead to some degree of inequalities in discourse. Thus, the ide-alized public sphere of full
discursive inclusion and equality requires that social inequalities be eliminated. Yet how is social
inequality to befullyidentified,letaloneeliminated? The idealization seems wholly in-adequate given
contemporary capitalist systems and associated social inequality . However, it is in the very process of
argumentation, even if flawed, that the identification and critique of social inequality, and thus of
communicative inequality, is able to develop. Indeed, public sphere deliberation often comes into
existence when and where people become passionate about social injustice and publicly thematize
problems of social inequality. Thus the “negative power” of social inequality – as with other forms of
coercion – is brought to light and critique by the very discourse it is limiting.
This is not to say that subjects are merely effects of discourse, that there are no critical social agents acting
in the process. It is not to say that
125 subjects within discourse cannot themselves identify negative forms of power, cannot reflexively
monitor their own arguments, cannot rationally criticize other positions, and so on. They can, and in
practice do, despite the instability of meaning . The point is that this reasoning and understanding is
(provisionally) achieved through the subject’s situatedness in discourse rather than via a pre-discursive
abstract subject. As Kenneth Baynes argues, it is through discourse that subjects achieve adegree of
reflective distance (what we could call autonomy) from their situations, “enabling them to revise their
conceptions of what is valuable or worthy of pursuit,[and]to assess various courses of action with respect
to those ends.” 66 Democratic discourse generates civic-oriented selves, inter-subjective meanings and
understandings, and democratic agreements that can be seen as the basis of public sovereignty. How-ever,
the idea of communicatively produced agreements, which in the public sphere are known as public
opinions, has also come under ex-tensive criticism in terms of excluding difference, criticism that I wantto
explore in the next section.
The ends of discourse: Public opinion formation
The starting point of discourse is disagreement over problematic validity claims. However, a certain
amount of agreement, or at least mutual understanding, is presupposed when interlocutors engage in
argumentation. All communication presupposes mutual understanding on the linguistic terms used –
that interlocutors use the same terms in the same way.67 Furthermore, in undertaking rational-critical
discourse, according to Habermas’ formal pragmatic reconstruction, interlocutors also presuppose the
same formal conditions of argumentation . These shared presuppositions enable rational-critical
discourse to be undertaken. However, as seen above, meaning is never fixed and understanding is always
partial. Understanding and agreement on the use of linguistic terms and of what it means to be
reasonable, reflexive, sincere, inclusive, non-coercive, etc. takes place within discourse and is an ongoing
political process.
Conway 97
They presume the purity of their experience in place of facts---we must
examine multiple perspectives
Conway 97—philosophy, Penn State (Daniel, Nietzsche and the political, 135-6)
This preference is clearly political in nature
any epistemic
privilege necessarily implies a political (i.e., situated) preference
All perspectives are partial, all standpoints situated—
It is
absolutely crucial
that we acknowledge claims about situated knowledge as
themselves situated within the political agenda
feminist
s must
accept
the
self-referential implications of their own epistemic claims ¶ The political agenda of
assigns
to some) subjugated standpoints a political preference or priority.
, and Haraway makes no pretense of aspiring to epistemic purity or foundational innocence. For Haraway,
. Her postmodern orientation elides the boundaries traditionally drawn between politics and
epistemology, and thus renders otiose the ideal of epistemic purity.
including those of feminist theorists.
to Haraway's postmodern feminist project
her
she sets for postmodern feminism;
theorist
.
therefore
and accommodate
postmodern feminism thus
(
Haraway, for example, believes that some subjugated standpoints may be more
immediately revealing, especially since they have been discounted and excluded for so long. They may prove especially useful in coming to understand the political and psychological mechanisms whereby the patriarchy discounts the radically situated
knowledges of others while claiming for its own (situated) knowledge an illicit epistemic privilege: ¶ The standpoints of the subjugated ... are savvy to modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts— ways of being nowhere while
claiming to sec comprehensively. The subjugated have a decent chance to be on to the god-trick and all its dazzling—and, therefore, blinding—illuminations.34 ¶
not afford
But these subjugated standpoints do
an epistemically privileged view of the world,
Haraway warns against the ¶
danger of
appropriating the vision of the less
powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor
unproblematic , even if "we" "naturally" inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated
knowledges The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination
The standpoints of the subjugated are not "innocent" positions ¶
A subjugated standpoint may shed new light on the ways of an oppressor, but it in no way renders
superfluous
the standpoint of the oppressor. Because neither standpoint fully comprises the
other the aggregation of the two would move both parties
closer to a more objective
understanding of the world If some
have political reasons for disavowing this project of
aggregation, or for adopting it selectively, then they must pursue their political agenda at the expense
of the greater objectivity that they might otherwise have gained
feminist theorists
independent of the political agendas they have established. Reprising elements of Nietzsche's
psychological profile of the "slave" type,
serious
romanticizing and/or
.
, decoding, deconstruction,
and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical enquiry.
.35
or redundant
,
(or a third party)
.
feminists
.
Alt Fails – Strategy Key
Alternative alone can’t solve – focus on tactics and strategy key
Rachel Saloom 6, JD Univ of Georgia School of Law and M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from U of Chicago, Fall 2006, A
Feminist Inquiry into International Law and International Relations, 12 Roger Williams U. L. Rev. 159, Lexis
Because patriarchy is embedded within society, it is no surprise that the theory and practice of both international law and
international relations is also patriarchal. 98 Total critique, however, presents no method by which to challenge
current hegemonic practices. Feminist scholars have yet to provide a coherent way in which total critique
can be applied to change the nature of international law and international relations. Some [*178] feminist
scholars are optimistic for the possibility of changing the way the current system is structured. For example, Whitworth believes that
"sites of resistance are always available to those who oppose the status quo." 99 Enloe suggests that since the world of international
politics has been made it can also be remade. 100 She posits that every time a woman speaks out about how the government controls
her, new theories are being made. 101 All of these theorists highlight the manner in which gender criticisms can
destabilize traditional theories. They provide no mechanism , however, for the actual implementation of
their theories into practice. While in the abstract, resistance to hegemonic paradigms seems like a promising concept, gender
theorists have made no attempt to make their resistance culminate in meaningful change. The notion of rethinking
traditional approaches to international law and international relations does not go far enough in prescribing
an alternative theoretical basis for understanding the international arena. Enloe's plea for women to
speak out about international politics does not go nearly far enough in explaining how those acts could
have the potential to actually change the practice of international relations. Either women are already
speaking out now, and their voices alone are not an effective mechanism to challenge the system, or women
are not even speaking out about world politics currently. Obviously it is absurd to assume that women remain silent about world
politics. If that is the case, then one must question women's ability to speak up, challenge, and change the system.
AT: Negativity Alt (Hooks)
Optimism and solidarity are our only hope---their pessimism accepts the
foundational premises of patriarchy/racism as its starting point for politics
bell hooks 96, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Google Books, 269-272
black Americans are succumbing to and internalizing the racist assumption that
there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and whites. It is fascinating to explore why it is that black people
269More than ever before in our history,
trapped in the worst situation of racial oppres sion—enslavement—had the foresight to see that it would be disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people
to transform themselves and divest of white supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that
black folks, like their white counterparts, have passively accepted the
internalization of white supremacist assumptions . Organized white supremacists have always taught that
there can never be trust and intimacy between the superior white race and the inferior black race. When
black people internalize these sentiments, no resistance to white supremacy is taking place; rather we
become complicit in spreading racist notions . It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism because
white people will not repudiate racism. Con temporary
of being daily assaulted by white denial and refusal of accountability. We must not allow the actions of white folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our
resistance. Like our white allies in struggle we must consistently keep the faith, by always sharing the truth that 270white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not
some immutable character flaw.
Of course many white people are comfortable with a rhetoric of race that suggests racism cannot be
changed, that all white people are “inherently racist” simply because they are born and raised in this society. Such misguided thinking
socializes white people both to remain ignorant of the way in which white supremacist attitudes are learned and to assume a posture
of learned helplessness as though they have no agency—no capacity to resist this thinking. Luckily we have many autobiographies by white folks
committed to anti-racist struggle that provide documentary testimony that many of these individuals repudiated racism when they were children. Far
from passively accepting It as inherent, they instinctively felt it was wrong. Many of them witnessed bizarre acts of white racist aggression towards
black folks in everyday life and responded to the injustice of the situation. Sadly, in our times so many white folks are easily convinced by racist whites
and bLack folks who have internalized racism that they can never be really free of racism.
These feelings aíso then obsc]re the reality of white privi lege. As long as white folks are taught to accept racism as ‘natura]” then they do not have to see
themselves as con sciously creating a racist society by their actions, by their political choices. This means as well that they do not have to face the way in
which acting in a racist manner ensures the maintenance of white privilege. Indeed, denying their agency allows them to believe white privilege does
not exist even as they daily exercise it. If the young white woman who had been raped had chosen to hold all black males account able for what
happened, she would have been exercising white privilege and reinforcing the structure of racist thought which teaches that all black people are alike.
Unfortunately,
271so many white people are eager to believe racism cannot be changed because internalizing that assumption downplays the issue of accountability.
No responsibility need be taken for not changing something ¡fit is perceived as immutable. To accept racism as a system of domination that can be
changed would demand that everyone who sees him- or herself as embracing a vision of radai social equality would be required to assert anti-racist
habits of being. We know from histories both present and past that white people (and everyone else) who commit themselves to living in anti-racist
ways need to make sacrifices, to courageously endure the uncomfortable to challenge and change.
Whites, people of color, and black folks are reluctant to commit themselves fully and deeply to an anti-racist
struggle that is ongoing because there is such a pervasive feeling of hopelessness—a conviction that nothing
will ever change . How any of us can continue to hold those feelings when we study the history of racism
in this society and see how much has changed makes no logical sense. Clearly we have not gone far
enough. In the late sixties, Martin Luther King posed the question “Where do we go from here.” To live in anti-racist society we must
collectively renew our commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice and equality. Pursuing that
vision we create a culture where beloved community flourishes and is sustained . Those of us who know the joy of
being with folks from all walks of life, all races, who are fundamentalls’ anti-racist in their habits of being. need to give public testimony. Ve need to
share not only what we have experienced but the conditions of change that make such an experience possible. The interracial circle of love that I know
can happen because each individual present in it has made his or her own commitment to living an anti- racist life and to furthering the struggle to end
white supremacy 272 will become a reality for everyone only if those of us who have created these communities share how they emerge in our lives and
the strategies we use to sustain them. Our devout commitment to building diverse communities is cen tral. These commitments to anti-racist living are
just one expression of who we are and what we share with one an other but they form the foundation of that sharing. Like
all beloved
communities we affirm our differences. It is this generous spirit of affirmation that gives us the courage to challenge one another, to
work through misunderstandings, especially those that have to do with race and racism. In a beloved community solidarity and trust
are grounded in profound commitment to a shared vision. Those of us who are always anti-racist long for a world in which
evezyone can form a beloved community where borders can be crossed and cultural hybridity celebrated. Anyone can begin to make such a community
by truly seeking to live in an anti-racist world. If
that longing guides our vision and our actions, the new culture will be
born and anti-racist communities of resis tance will emerge everywhere. That is where we must go from
here.
AT: Affirmation of Self
We have to extend politics beyond the realm of our immediate experience
and the confines of the debate space---structural analysis key
Rob 14 Carleton College, Robtheidealist, My Skinfolk Ain't All Kinfolk,
www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/problem-identity-politics/
identity politics merely means
political activity that caters to the interests of a particular social group. In a certain sense, all politics are
identity politics. However, it’s one thing to intentionally form a group around articulated interests; it’s
another matter entirely when group membership is socially imposed.
Personal identities are socially defined through a combination of systemic rewards/marginalization plus actual and/or
potential violence. We can’t build politics from that foundation because these socially imposed identities
don’t necessarily tell us anything about someone’s political interests. Successful identity politics requires
shared interests, not shared personal identities.
I’m not here to tell you that personal identity doesn’t matter; we rightfully point out that systemic power
shapes people’s lives. Simply put, my message is that personal identity is not the only thing that matters. We spend so much energy labeling
people—privileged/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed—that we often neglect to build spaces that
antagonize the systems that cause our collective trauma .
Some people look at these flaws and call for an end to “identity politics”, but I think that’s a mistake. At its most basic level,
All You Blacks Want All the Same Things
We assume that if a person is systemically marginalized, then they must have a vested interest in dismantling that system. Yet, that’s not always the case.
Take Orville Lloyd Douglas, who last summer wrote an article in the Guardian in which he admitted that he hates being Black.
I can honestly say I hate being a black male… I just don’t fit into a neat category of the stereotypical views people have of black men. I hate rap music, I hate most sports, and I
like listening to rock music… I have nothing in common with the archetypes about the black male… I resent being compared to young black males (or young people of any race)
who are lazy, not disciplined, or delinquent. Orville Lloyd Douglas, Why I Hate Being a Black Man
As we can see from Douglas’ cry for help, membership in a marginalized group is no guarantee that a person can
understand and effectively combat systemic oppression. Yet, we seem to treat all marginalized voices as
equal, as if they are all insightful, as if there is no diversity of thought, as if—in the case of race– “All you
Blacks want all the same things”.
Shared identity does not equal shared interests. John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of 12 Years a Slave, is a good example. He’s
written screenplays based on Jimi Hendrix, the L.A. riots, and other poignant moments and icons within Black history. He wants to see more Black people in Hollywood and he
has a long history of successfully incorporating Black and Brown characters into comic book stories and franchises.
However, in 2006, Ridley made waves with an essay in which he castigated Black people who did not live up to his standards; saying, “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish
niggers good luck.”
So I say this: It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days worrying
specifically about the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to
celebrate the New Black Americans—those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time
to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement. The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger
While Ridley and I share cultural affinity, and we both want to see Black people doing well, shared cultural affinity and common identity are not enough– which recent history
Don
Lemon, speaking in support of Bill O’Reilly, said that racism would be lessened if Black people pulled up
their pants and stopped littering. Last fall, 40% of Black U.S. Americans supported airstrikes against
Syria.
makes abundantly clear. Barack Obama continues to deport record numbers of Brown immigrants here at home, while mercilessly bombing Brown folks abroad.
My skinfolk ain’t all kinfolk, and the Left needs to catch up.
NO MORE ALLIES
John Ridley, Barack Obama, myself, and Don Lemon are all Black males. We also have conflicting political positions and interests, but how can we decide which paths are valid
if we only pay attention to personal identity?
Instead of learning to recognize how the overarching systems maintain their power and then attacking
those tools, we spend our energy finding an “other” to embody the systemic marginalization and
legitimize our spaces and ideals. In some interracial spaces I feel like nothing more than an
interchangeable token whose only purpose is to legitimize the politics of my White peers. If not me, then some other
Black person would fill the slot.
We use these “others” as authorities on various issues, and we use concepts like “privilege” to ensure that
people stay in their lanes. People of color are the authorities on race, while LGBTQ people are the authorities on gender and sexuality, and so forth and so on.
Yet, experience is not the same as expertise, and privilege doesn’t automatically make you clueless . As I’ve
discussed, these groups are not oriented around a singular set of political ideals and practices. Furthermore, as we see in
Andrea Smith’s work, there are often competing interests within these groups . We mistake essentialism for
intersectionality as we look for the ideal subjects to embody the various forms of oppression ; true intersectionality
is a description of systemic power, not a call for diversity.
If we don’t develop any substantive analysis of systemic power , then it’s impossible to know what our
interests are, and aligning with one another according to shared interests is out of the question. In this
climate all that remains is the ally, which requires no real knowledge or political effort, only the
willingness to appear supportive of an “other”. We can’t build power that way.
After having gathered to oppose organized White supremacy at the University of North Carolina, a group
of organizers in Durham, North Carolina found that the Left’s emphasis on personal identity and allyship was a major
reason why their efforts collapsed. They proposed that we adopt the practice of forming alliances rather
than identifying allies . (h/t NinjaBikeSlut)
Much of the discourse around being an ally seems to presume a relationship of one-sided support, with one person or group following another’s leadership. While there are
In an alliance, the two parties support each
other while maintaining their own self-determination and autonomy, and are bound together not by the
relationship of leader and follower but by a shared goal. In other words, one cannot actually be the ally of
a group or individual with whom one has no political affinity – and this means that one cannot be an ally
to an entire demographic group, like people of color, who do not share a singular cohesive political or
personal desire. The Divorce of Thought From Deed
While it’s vital for me to learn the politics and history of marginalized experiences that differ from my
own, listen to their voices, and respect their spaces and contributions — it’s also important for me to understand the ways in which
these same systems have shaped my own identity/history as well. Since we know that oppression is systemic and
multidimensional, then I’m going to have to step outside of personal experience and begin to develop political
ideals and practices that actually antagonize those systems . I have to understand and articulate my
interests, which will allow me to operate from a position of strength and form political alliances that
advance those interests– interests which speak to issues beyond just my own immediate experience .
certainly times where this makes sense, it is misleading to use the term ally to describe this relationship.